Meteor showers from Belém in 2026

Meteor showers over Belém in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Belém, Pará — 1.5°S, 48.50°W, 15 m, America/Belem — 12 of them put a radiant above the horizon in darkness at maximum, 2 pass ten an hour, and the Geminids tops the 2026 list at 29.7 an hour.

Clock time here runs 14 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:08 rather than 00:00. Belém, Pará is the 278th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 1.50 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 10:41 on 14 December 2026 Belém time. Its radiant culminates 56.2° up at 02:17 bearing N, the Moon is 22% lit, and 23:00–05:00 is the window — about 29.7 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 15.0 an hour on 12 August (radiant 29.3° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 5.6 on 3 January (radiant 20.8°, Moon 99%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Belém is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 0.1 an hour on 22 December with the radiant reaching 13.1° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Northern Taurids at 1.3 an hour on 12 November.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Belém horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 1.5°S, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 13.1°.

Nothing is circumpolar from 1.5°S among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Belém rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Belém at 18:14, astronomical darkness runs 19:29 to 04:47, and sunrise is 06:02 — 9 h 18 min of real darkness inside 11 h 48 min of night. These are America/Belem times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Belém runs from 9 h 17 min on the Ursids night (22 December) to 9 h 35 min on the April Lyrids night (22 April). 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 Belém are Perseids (0% lit, 15.0/h).

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

Near Belém

The closest other cities covered here are Fortaleza (1135 km ESE), Manaus (1293 km W), Brasília (1594 km S), Recife (1678 km ESE), Salvador (1690 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.

Belém is isolated in this dataset — no other of the 300 cities lies within 500 km, and it is one of 12 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.