Meteor showers from Ouagadougou in 2026

Meteor showers over Ouagadougou in 2026

Ouagadougou, Centre sits at 12.4°N, 1.53°W, 299 m above sea level, and keeps Africa/Ouagadougou time. Of the twelve established showers on the annual calendar, 12 lift their radiant above this horizon during darkness on the night of maximum and 3 clear ten meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky. The Geminids leads, at 54.2 an hour.

Clock time here runs 6 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:01 rather than 00:00. Ouagadougou, Centre is the 145th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 2.42 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 13:41 on 14 December 2026 Ouagadougou time. Its radiant culminates 70.2° up at 02:09 bearing N, the Moon is 29% lit, and 23:00–06:00 is the window — about 54.2 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 29.0 an hour on 13 August (radiant 43.3° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 13.3 on 3 January (radiant 41.6°, Moon 99%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Ouagadougou is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 1.0 an hour on 22 December with the radiant reaching 26.8° at culmination.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Ouagadougou horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 12.4°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 26.8°.

Nothing is circumpolar from 12.4°N among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Ouagadougou rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Ouagadougou at 17:42, astronomical darkness runs 18:58 to 05:03, and sunrise is 06:19 — 10 h 4 min of real darkness inside 12 h 36 min of night. These are Africa/Ouagadougou times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Ouagadougou runs from 8 h 49 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 10 h 5 min on the Ursids night (22 December). 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. In 2026 the showers that catch a dark Moon from Ouagadougou are Perseids (0% lit, 29.0/h).

Working against them, Quadrantids (99% lit), Orionids (81% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Ouagadougou

The closest other cities covered here are Kumasi (631 km S), Bamako (700 km W), Lomé (757 km SSE), Accra (771 km S), Ibadan (814 km SE). 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.

Ouagadougou is isolated in this dataset — no other of the 300 cities lies within 500 km, and it is the only one 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.