Meteor showers from Salvador in 2026

Meteor showers over Salvador in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Salvador, Bahia — 13.0°S, 38.49°W, 4 m, America/Bahia — 11 of them put a radiant above the horizon in darkness at maximum, 4 pass ten an hour, and the Geminids tops the 2026 list at 104.9 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. Salvador, Bahia is the 131st largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 2.71 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 10:41 on 14 December 2026 Salvador time. Its radiant culminates 44.7° up at 01:37 bearing N, the Moon is 22% lit, and 23:00–04:00 is the window — about 104.9 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 29.4 an hour on 12 August (radiant 18.9° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Orionids 17.0 on 21 October (radiant 61.3°, Moon 82%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Salvador 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 1.5° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the October Draconids at 1.0 an hour on 8 October.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Salvador horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 13.0°S, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 1.5°.

Nothing is circumpolar from 13.0°S among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Salvador rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Salvador at 17:54, astronomical darkness runs 19:13 to 03:43, and sunrise is 05:02 — 8 h 29 min of real darkness inside 11 h 7 min of night. These are America/Bahia times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Salvador runs from 8 h 29 min on the Ursids night (22 December) to 10 hours 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 Salvador are Perseids (0% lit, 29.4/h).

Working against them, Orionids (82% lit), eta-Aquariids (83% lit), Quadrantids (99% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Salvador

The closest other cities covered here are Recife (675 km NE), Belo Horizonte (966 km SW), Fortaleza (1030 km N), Brasília (1063 km WSW), Rio de Janeiro (1210 km SSW). 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.

Salvador 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.