Geminids from Tokyo in 2026

Geminids from Tokyo: the short answer

Maximum for the Geminids in 2026 is 22:41 Tokyo time on 14 December 2026. From 35.7°N the radiant gets to 86.5° at 01:44, the Moon is 26% lit, and the ideal-sky ceiling is 149.5 meteors an hour.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Tokyo in 2026, ahead of the Perseids at 83.9 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

At 35.7°N a declination-+32.3° radiant traces an arc from 17:56 to 09:32, topping out at 86.5° at 01:44 bearing 180°. Inside the dark window it only manages 85.3°, and that lower figure is the one the rates are built from. The radiant currently lies in Gemini.

When it gets dark here

Tokyo loses the Sun at 16:28 and gets it back at 06:43. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 18:00 to 05:11, 11 h 12 min out of 14 h 15 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:35 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Tokyo runs 19 minutes behind mean solar time at 139.69°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 10:42. Moonset 21:02. At the best hour it is 56.6° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 6.50.

Why 150 an hour and not 150

Converting ZHR 150 into something useful for Tokyo means multiplying by sin(85.3°) and dividing by 2.6 raised to (6.5 − 6.50). That lands at 149.5 meteors an hour, from medium-speed 33.8 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 17:00 (radiant -8.0°) to 0.8 at 06:00 (radiant 37.9°), peaking at 149.5. 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 Tokyo rather than the only one.

Watching from around Tokyo

Tokyo is the 21st largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 9.73 million at 44 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Nagoya (259 km WSW), Osaka (397 km WSW), Sapporo (833 km N) — 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.