Meteor showers from Minsk in 2026

Meteor showers over Minsk in 2026

Latitude 53.9°N, longitude 27.57°E, elevation 222 m, time zone Europe/Minsk: those four numbers decide most of what Minsk can see. 12 of the twelve annual showers get their radiant up in darkness at maximum here and 6 are worth a late night, led by the Geminids at 139.2 meteors an hour.

Clock time here runs 70 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 01:04 rather than 00:00. Minsk is the 224th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 1.74 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 16:41 on 14 December 2026 Minsk time. Its radiant culminates 68.3° up at 03:13 bearing S, the Moon is 28% lit, and 23:00–08:00 is the window — about 139.2 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 77.1 an hour on 13 August (radiant 73.3° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 50.5 on 4 January (radiant 74.8°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Minsk is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the eta-Aquariids manages 0.4 an hour on 6 May with the radiant reaching 36.1° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Southern delta-Aquariids at 2.7 an hour on 31 July.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Minsk horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the higher mid-latitudes at 53.9°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Southern delta-Aquariids, at 20.2°.

Perseids (85.9° at culmination), Quadrantids (85.6° at culmination), Ursids (68.3° at culmination), October Draconids (88.0° at culmination) never set from 53.9°N at all — the radiant stays above the horizon around the clock, so darkness and the Moon are the only things limiting those nights.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Minsk at 16:47, astronomical darkness runs 19:00 to 07:08, and sunrise is 09:21 — 12 h 9 min of real darkness inside 16 h 34 min of night. These are Europe/Minsk times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Minsk runs from 17 minutes on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 12 h 11 min on the Ursids night (23 December). 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 Minsk are Perseids (0% lit, 77.1/h).

Working against them, Quadrantids (100% lit), Orionids (79% lit), Ursids (98% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Minsk

The closest other cities covered here are Kyiv (433 km SSE), Warsaw (476 km WSW), Moscow (675 km ENE), Saint Petersburg (692 km NNE), Stockholm (836 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 Minsk is the only one covered in its country. The nearest, Kyiv, is 433 km SSE on a bearing of 151°.

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.