Geminids from Shenyang in 2026

Geminids from Shenyang: the short answer

The Geminids reaches maximum at 21:41 local time on 14 December 2026 over Shenyang, Liaoning (41.8°N, 123.43°E, 53 m). The radiant culminates 80.4° high at 01:49 and the useful window runs 22:00–06:00, with a ceiling of 13.6 meteors an hour on Shenyang's own measured sky.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Shenyang in 2026, ahead of the Perseids at 12.2 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 17:32 bearing NE, culminates 80.4° up at 01:49 towards south (180°), and sets at 10:06. It lies inside Gemini. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 80.4° buys you 99% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Shenyang is 16:15, civil twilight ends 16:47, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 17:56. It holds until 05:25, with sunrise at 07:06: 11 h 29 min of real darkness inside 14 h 50 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:41 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 14 minutes behind mean solar time at 123.43°E. That offset is why the best hour on this page is not the hour you would guess from the clock.

What the Moon does here

The Moon is 26% lit and out of the way for 10 of the 14 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 10:56. Moonset 20:59. At the best hour it is 51.8° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 4.00.

Why 14 an hour and not 150

Zenithal hourly rate 150, population index 2.6, entry speed 33.8 km/s — medium-speed. Those are stream constants. What changes from city to city is the geometry: at 80.2° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 4.00, Shenyang converts that ZHR into about 13.6 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 17:00 (radiant -4.0°) to 1.3 at 06:00 (radiant 40.2°), peaking at 13.6. That spread across 14 hours is why a "what time" answer beats a "how many" answer.

The stream comes from Minor planet (3200) Phaethon and is listed as active 4 December to 20 December, so 14 December 2026 is the best night from Shenyang rather than the only one.

Watching from around Shenyang

Shenyang, Liaoning is the 42nd largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 7.05 million at 53 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Anshan (83 km SSW), Changchun (279 km NNE), Jilin (342 km NE) — close enough that the radiant altitudes barely change, far enough that sunset and moonrise do.

What this page does not know

Rates on this page are computed against this city's own measured sky brightness, derived from satellite night-lights data. That is a calculated brightness for the point directly overhead, not a survey of your street: a park on the edge of town and a lit car park in the centre share the same figure here and will not look the same. It is also zenith-only, while the Bortle scale describes the whole sky from horizon to horizon.

Cloud cover is a forecast, not a constant, so it is resolved when you load the tonight card and is deliberately absent from this prerendered page — the hourly table shows "unavailable" rather than assuming clear skies. Meteor outbursts, local terrain and building horizons are not modelled.

A single observer with an unobstructed horizon typically records 30–50% below the ideal-sky figure. Give your eyes twenty minutes to adapt, keep bright screens away, look about halfway up the sky rather than straight at the radiant, and count for a full hour before judging a shower.