Meteor showers from Perth in 2026

Meteor showers over Perth in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Perth, Western Australia — 32.0°S, 115.86°E, 34 m, Australia/Perth — 9 of them put a radiant above the horizon in darkness at maximum, 0 pass ten an hour, and the Geminids tops the 2026 list at 6.0 an hour.

Clock time here runs 17 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:11 rather than 00:00. Perth, Western Australia is the 149th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 2.38 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 21:41 on 14 December 2026 Perth time. Its radiant culminates 25.8° up at 02:20 bearing N, the Moon is 26% lit, and 00:00–04:00 is the window — about 6.0 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Orionids manages 1.3 an hour on 22 October (radiant 42.1° at best, Moon 78% lit) and the April Lyrids 1.2 on 23 April (radiant 24.4°, Moon 34%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Perth 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 -17.6° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the April Lyrids at 1.2 an hour on 23 April.

What this latitude allows

Latitude decides what is available at all. From 32.0°S, Ursids never lift a radiant above the Perth horizon at maximum — the best any of them manages over the whole 24 hours is -17.6°, still under the horizon. Their radiants sit too far into the northern sky, and only travelling fixes that.

Nothing is circumpolar from 32.0°S among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Perth rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Perth at 19:17, astronomical darkness runs 20:57 to 03:24, and sunrise is 05:04 — 6 h 27 min of real darkness inside 9 h 47 min of night. These are Australia/Perth times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Perth runs from 6 h 25 min on the Ursids night (23 December) to 10 h 38 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 Perth: none of the showers that clear five meteors an hour here peak with the Moon properly out of the way.

Near Perth

The closest other cities covered here are Adelaide (2131 km ESE), Melbourne (2721 km ESE), Surabaya (2766 km N), Semarang (2832 km NNW), Bandung (2912 km NNW). 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.

Perth 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.