Meteor showers from Porto Alegre in 2026

Meteor showers over Porto Alegre in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul — 30.0°S, 51.23°W, 46 m, America/Sao_Paulo — 9 of them put a radiant above the horizon in darkness at maximum, 1 pass ten an hour, and the Geminids tops the 2026 list at 10.2 an hour.

Clock time here runs 25 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:19 rather than 00:00. Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul is the 280th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 1.49 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 10:41 on 14 December 2026 Porto Alegre time. Its radiant culminates 27.7° up at 02:28 bearing N, the Moon is 22% lit, and 00:00–04:00 is the window — about 10.2 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Orionids manages 2.2 an hour on 21 October (radiant 44.2° at best, Moon 82% lit) and the April Lyrids 1.8 on 22 April (radiant 26.4°, Moon 39%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Porto Alegre 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 -15.5° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Southern Taurids at 1.0 an hour on 5 November.

What this latitude allows

Latitude decides what is available at all. From 30.0°S, Ursids never lift a radiant above the Porto Alegre horizon at maximum — the best any of them manages over the whole 24 hours is -15.5°, still under the horizon. Their radiants sit too far into the northern sky, and only travelling fixes that.

Nothing is circumpolar from 30.0°S among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Porto Alegre rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Porto Alegre at 19:20, astronomical darkness runs 20:57 to 03:41, and sunrise is 05:17 — 6 h 44 min of real darkness inside 9 h 57 min of night. These are America/Sao_Paulo times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Porto Alegre runs from 6 h 42 min on the Ursids night (22 December) to 10 h 35 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 Porto Alegre: none of the showers that clear five meteors an hour here peak with the Moon properly out of the way.

Near Porto Alegre

The closest other cities covered here are Curitiba (547 km NNE), Asunción (823 km NW), Buenos Aires (842 km SW), São Paulo (853 km NNE), Rio de Janeiro (1126 km NE). 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.

Porto Alegre 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.