Meteor showers from Fortaleza in 2026

Meteor showers over Fortaleza in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Fortaleza, Ceará — 3.7°S, 38.54°W, 18 m, America/Fortaleza — 12 of them put a radiant above the horizon in darkness at maximum, 5 pass ten an hour, and the Geminids tops the 2026 list at 120.7 an hour.

Clock time here runs 26 minutes behind mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 23:28 rather than 00:00. Fortaleza, Ceará is the 147th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 2.40 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 10:41 on 14 December 2026 Fortaleza time. Its radiant culminates 54.0° up at 01:37 bearing N, the Moon is 22% lit, and 23:00–05:00 is the window — about 120.7 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 44.0 an hour on 12 August (radiant 28.1° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Orionids 18.9 on 21 October (radiant 70.6°, Moon 82%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Fortaleza is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 0.4 an hour on 22 December with the radiant reaching 10.8° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the October Draconids at 1.7 an hour on 8 October.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Fortaleza horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 3.7°S, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 10.8°.

Nothing is circumpolar from 3.7°S among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Fortaleza rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Fortaleza at 17:38, astronomical darkness runs 18:54 to 04:03, and sunrise is 05:18 — 9 h 9 min of real darkness inside 11 h 40 min of night. These are America/Fortaleza times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Fortaleza runs from 9 h 9 min on the Ursids night (22 December) to 9 h 39 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 Fortaleza are Perseids (0% lit, 44.0/h).

Working against them, Orionids (82% lit), Quadrantids (99% 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 Fortaleza

The closest other cities covered here are Recife (630 km SE), Salvador (1030 km S), Belém (1135 km WNW), Brasília (1689 km SW), Goiânia (1856 km SW). 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.

Fortaleza 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

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.