Meteor showers from Kinshasa in 2026

Meteor showers over Kinshasa in 2026

Kinshasa sits at 4.3°S, 15.31°E, 281 m above sea level, and keeps Africa/Kinshasa time. Of the twelve established showers on the annual calendar, 12 lift their radiant above this horizon during darkness on the night of maximum and 2 clear ten meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky. The Geminids leads, at 28.8 an hour.

Clock time here runs 1 minute behind mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 23:53 rather than 00:00. Kinshasa is the 5th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 16.00 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 14:41 on 14 December 2026 Kinshasa time. Its radiant culminates 53.5° up at 02:02 bearing N, the Moon is 28% lit, and 23:00–05:00 is the window — about 28.8 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 12.5 an hour on 13 August (radiant 27.0° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the April Lyrids 4.7 on 22 April (radiant 52.4°, Moon 37%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Kinshasa 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 10.1° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Northern Taurids at 1.3 an hour on 12 November.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Kinshasa horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 4.3°S, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 10.1°.

Nothing is circumpolar from 4.3°S among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Kinshasa rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Kinshasa at 18:04, astronomical darkness runs 19:20 to 04:26, and sunrise is 05:42 — 9 h 7 min of real darkness inside 11 h 38 min of night. These are Africa/Kinshasa times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Kinshasa runs from 9 h 6 min on the Ursids night (22 December) to 9 h 40 min on the Perseids night (13 August). 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 Kinshasa are Perseids (0% lit, 12.5/h).

Near Kinshasa

The closest other cities covered here are Brazzaville (8 km NNW), Luanda (551 km SSW), Mbuji-Mayi (938 km ESE), Port Harcourt (1369 km NW), Onitsha (1501 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.

1 of the 300 cities lie within 500 km of here, and 3 share its country. The nearest, Brazzaville, is 8 km NNW on a bearing of 334°.

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.