Meteor showers from Adelaide in 2026

Meteor showers over Adelaide in 2026

Adelaide, South Australia sits at 34.9°S, 138.60°E, 59 m above sea level, and keeps Australia/Adelaide time. Of the twelve established showers on the annual calendar, 8 lift their radiant above this horizon during darkness on the night of maximum and 0 clear ten meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky. The Geminids leads, at 8.6 an hour.

Clock time here runs 76 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 01:10 rather than 00:00. Adelaide, South Australia is the 287th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 1.47 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 00:11 on 15 December 2026 Adelaide time. Its radiant culminates 22.8° up at 03:19 bearing N, the Moon is 25% lit, and 01:00–05:00 is the window — about 8.6 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Orionids manages 1.8 an hour on 22 October (radiant 38.7° at best, Moon 77% lit) and the April Lyrids 1.5 on 23 April (radiant 21.5°, Moon 33%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Adelaide is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 0.0 an hour on 23 December with the radiant reaching -20.6° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the eta-Aquariids at 1.4 an hour on 6 May.

What this latitude allows

Latitude decides what is available at all. From 34.9°S, October Draconids, Perseids, Ursids never lift a radiant above the Adelaide horizon at maximum — the best any of them manages over the whole 24 hours is -0.8°, still under the horizon. Their radiants sit too far into the northern sky, and only travelling fixes that.

Nothing is circumpolar from 34.9°S among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Adelaide rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Adelaide at 20:24, astronomical darkness runs 22:11 to 04:09, and sunrise is 05:55 — 5 h 58 min of real darkness inside 9 h 31 min of night. These are Australia/Adelaide times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Adelaide runs from 5 h 56 min on the Ursids night (23 December) to 10 h 43 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July). Long nights give a shower room to perform even when its radiant rises late.

Moon luck in 2026

Moon phase makes or breaks a meteor year, and 2026 is unkind to Adelaide: none of the showers that clear five meteors an hour here peak with the Moon properly out of the way.

Near Adelaide

The closest other cities covered here are Melbourne (654 km ESE), Sydney (1162 km E), Brisbane (1601 km ENE), Perth (2131 km W), Auckland (3246 km ESE). Within a few tens of kilometres the radiant altitudes are effectively identical, so the reason to open a neighbour's page is the clock: sunset, moonrise and the peak window all shift with longitude and, across a border, with the time zone.

Adelaide is isolated in this dataset — no other of the 300 cities lies within 500 km, and it is one of 5 covered in its country.

What this page does not know

Every rate here uses this city's measured sky brightness, derived from satellite night-lights data and modelled down to a zenith brightness. It is one number for a whole metropolitan area, so a dark park on the edge of town will beat it and a floodlit street will not match it, and it describes the sky overhead rather than the whole horizon-to-horizon view the Bortle scale grades.

Cloud cover is not baked into this page — it is a forecast that changes by the hour, so it is resolved live rather than at build time and shows as "unavailable" in the tables rather than being assumed to be zero. 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 figures quoted here. 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.