Meteor showers from Santa Cruz de la Sierra in 2026

Meteor showers over Santa Cruz de la Sierra in 2026

Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Santa Cruz Department sits at 17.8°S, 63.18°W, 433 m above sea level, and keeps America/La_Paz time. Of the twelve established showers on the annual calendar, 11 lift their radiant above this horizon during darkness on the night of maximum and 4 clear ten meteors an hour on the reference sky. The Geminids leads, at 96.0 an hour.

Clock time here runs 13 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:07 rather than 00:00. Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Santa Cruz Department is the 212th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 1.83 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 09:41 on 14 December 2026 Santa Cruz de la Sierra time. Its radiant culminates 39.9° up at 02:16 bearing N, the Moon is 22% lit, and 00:00–05:00 is the window — about 96.0 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 22.8 an hour on 12 August (radiant 14.2° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Orionids 16.5 on 21 October (radiant 55.9°, Moon 82%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Santa Cruz de la Sierra is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 0.0 an hour on 22 December with the radiant reaching -3.2° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Northern Taurids at 3.8 an hour on 12 November.

What this latitude allows

Latitude decides what is available at all. From 17.8°S, Ursids never lift a radiant above the Santa Cruz de la Sierra horizon at maximum — the best any of them manages over the whole 24 hours is -3.2°, still under the horizon. Their radiants sit too far into the northern sky, and only travelling fixes that.

Nothing is circumpolar from 17.8°S among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Santa Cruz de la Sierra rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Santa Cruz de la Sierra at 18:42, astronomical darkness runs 20:04 to 04:09, and sunrise is 05:31 — 8 h 5 min of real darkness inside 10 h 49 min of night. These are America/La_Paz times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Santa Cruz de la Sierra runs from 8 h 4 min on the Ursids night (22 December) to 10 h 11 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. In 2026 the showers that catch a dark Moon from Santa Cruz de la Sierra are Perseids (0% lit, 22.8/h).

Working against them, Orionids (82% lit), eta-Aquariids (83% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Santa Cruz de la Sierra

The closest other cities covered here are La Paz (547 km WNW), Asunción (1011 km SSE), Goiânia (1484 km E), Córdoba (1518 km S), Lima (1618 km WNW). 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.

Santa Cruz de la Sierra is isolated in this dataset — no other of the 300 cities lies within 500 km, and it is one of 2 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.