Meteor showers from Rio de Janeiro in 2026

Meteor showers over Rio de Janeiro in 2026

Latitude 22.9°S, longitude 43.18°W, elevation 12 m, time zone America/Sao_Paulo: those four numbers decide most of what Rio de Janeiro can see. 10 of the twelve annual showers get their radiant up in darkness at maximum here and 0 are worth a late night, led by the Geminids at 7.8 meteors an hour.

Clock time here runs 7 minutes behind mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 23:47 rather than 00:00. Rio de Janeiro is the 44th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 6.75 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 10:41 on 14 December 2026 Rio de Janeiro time. Its radiant culminates 34.8° up at 01:55 bearing N, the Moon is 22% lit, and 23:00–04:00 is the window — about 7.8 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 2.1 an hour on 12 August (radiant 8.6° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the April Lyrids 1.6 on 22 April (radiant 33.8°, Moon 39%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Rio de Janeiro 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 -8.4° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the eta-Aquariids at 1.0 an hour on 6 May.

What this latitude allows

Latitude decides what is available at all. From 22.9°S, Ursids never lift a radiant above the Rio de Janeiro horizon at maximum — the best any of them manages over the whole 24 hours is -8.4°, still under the horizon. Their radiants sit too far into the northern sky, and only travelling fixes that.

Nothing is circumpolar from 22.9°S among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Rio de Janeiro rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Rio de Janeiro at 18:32, astronomical darkness runs 19:59 to 03:34, and sunrise is 05:01 — 7 h 35 min of real darkness inside 10 h 29 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 Rio de Janeiro runs from 7 h 34 min on the Ursids night (22 December) to 10 h 21 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 Rio de Janeiro: none of the showers that clear five meteors an hour here peak with the Moon properly out of the way.

Near Rio de Janeiro

The closest other cities covered here are Belo Horizonte (341 km NNW), São Paulo (360 km WSW), Curitiba (678 km WSW), Brasília (936 km NNW), Goiânia (939 km NW). 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.

2 of the 300 cities lie within 500 km of here, and 12 share its country. The nearest, Belo Horizonte, is 341 km NNW on a bearing of 347°.

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.