Geminids from Sydney in 2026

Geminids from Sydney: the short answer

The Geminids reaches maximum at 00:41 local time on 15 December 2026 over Sydney, New South Wales (33.9°S, 151.21°E, 58 m). The radiant culminates 23.9° high at 02:58 and the useful window runs 01:00–05:00, with an ideal-sky ceiling of 60.8 meteors an hour.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Sydney in 2026, ahead of the Orionids at 12.1 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

At 33.9°S a declination-+32.3° radiant traces an arc from 22:38 to 07:18, topping out at 23.9° at 02:58 bearing 360°. Inside the dark window it only manages 23.9°, and that lower figure is the one the rates are built from. The radiant currently lies in Gemini.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Sydney is 20:01, civil twilight ends 20:30, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 21:45. It holds until 03:54, with sunrise at 05:38: 6 h 9 min of real darkness inside 9 h 37 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:49 here rather than at 00:00: Australia/Sydney runs 55 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 151.21°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 25% lit and out of the way for 6 of the 9 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 10:47. Moonset 23:38. At the best hour it is 34.7° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 6.50.

Why 61 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 23.9° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 6.50, Sydney converts that ZHR into about 60.8 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 21:00 (radiant -17.0°) to 0.2 at 05:00 (radiant 18.0°), peaking at 60.8. That spread across 9 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 15 December 2026 is the best night from Sydney rather than the only one.

Watching from around Sydney

Sydney, New South Wales is the 48th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 5.64 million at 58 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Melbourne (713 km SW), Brisbane (733 km NNE), Adelaide (1162 km W) — close enough that the radiant altitudes barely change, far enough that sunset and moonrise do.

What this page does not know

Light-pollution data for this location is not connected yet. Rates on this page are computed against the reference rural sky the zenithal hourly rate is defined for (naked-eye limiting magnitude 6.5); they are not a claim about how bright the sky is where you are standing. Once the light-pollution layer is connected these figures will be recomputed for the local sky and will generally fall.

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.