Meteor showers from Sydney in 2026

Meteor showers over Sydney in 2026

Sydney, New South Wales sits at 33.9°S, 151.21°E, 58 m above sea level, and keeps Australia/Sydney 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 2 clear ten meteors an hour on the reference sky. The Geminids leads, at 60.8 an hour.

Clock time here runs 55 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:49 rather than 00:00. Sydney, New South Wales is the 48th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 5.64 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 00:41 on 15 December 2026 Sydney time. Its radiant culminates 23.9° up at 02:58 bearing N, the Moon is 25% lit, and 01:00–05:00 is the window — about 60.8 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Orionids manages 12.1 an hour on 22 October (radiant 40.3° at best, Moon 77% lit) and the eta-Aquariids 8.8 on 6 May (radiant 49.8°, Moon 80%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Sydney 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 -19.6° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Northern Taurids at 2.7 an hour on 13 November.

What this latitude allows

Latitude decides what is available at all. From 33.9°S, Perseids, Ursids never lift a radiant above the Sydney horizon at maximum — the best any of them manages over the whole 24 hours is -2.0°, still under the horizon. Their radiants sit too far into the northern sky, and only travelling fixes that.

Nothing is circumpolar from 33.9°S among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Sydney rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Sydney at 20:01, astronomical darkness runs 21:45 to 03:54, and sunrise is 05:38 — 6 h 9 min of real darkness inside 9 h 37 min of night. These are Australia/Sydney times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Sydney runs from 6 h 7 min on the Ursids night (23 December) to 10 h 41 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 Sydney: none of the showers that clear five meteors an hour here peak with the Moon properly out of the way.

Working against them, Orionids (77% lit), eta-Aquariids (80% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Sydney

The closest other cities covered here are Melbourne (713 km SW), Brisbane (733 km NNE), Adelaide (1162 km W), Auckland (2156 km ESE), Perth (3290 km W). 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.

Sydney 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

Light-pollution data for this location is not connected yet. Every rate here is computed against the reference rural sky the zenithal hourly rate is defined for (naked-eye limiting magnitude 6.5) and is not a statement about how bright this city's sky is. When the light-pollution layer lands these numbers will be recomputed and will generally fall.

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.