Meteor showers from Lubumbashi in 2026

Meteor showers over Lubumbashi in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Lubumbashi, Haut-Katanga — 11.7°S, 27.48°E, 1260 m, Africa/Lubumbashi — 11 of them put a radiant above the horizon in darkness at maximum, 2 pass ten an hour, and the Geminids tops the 2026 list at 25.8 an hour.

Clock time here runs 10 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:04 rather than 00:00. Lubumbashi, Haut-Katanga is the 163rd largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 2.22 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 15:41 on 14 December 2026 Lubumbashi time. Its radiant culminates 46.2° up at 02:13 bearing N, the Moon is 28% lit, and 23:00–05:00 is the window — about 25.8 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 10.2 an hour on 13 August (radiant 20.3° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Orionids 4.5 on 21 October (radiant 61.8°, Moon 80%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Lubumbashi is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 0.0 an hour on 23 December with the radiant reaching 2.8° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Northern Taurids at 1.2 an hour on 12 November.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Lubumbashi horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 11.7°S, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 2.8°.

Nothing is circumpolar from 11.7°S among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Lubumbashi rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Lubumbashi at 18:28, astronomical darkness runs 19:47 to 04:22, and sunrise is 05:41 — 8 h 35 min of real darkness inside 11 h 13 min of night. These are Africa/Lubumbashi times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Lubumbashi runs from 8 h 35 min on the Ursids night (23 December) to 9 h 57 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. In 2026 the showers that catch a dark Moon from Lubumbashi are Perseids (0% lit, 10.2/h).

Near Lubumbashi

The closest other cities covered here are Lusaka (426 km SSE), Mbuji-Mayi (748 km NW), Harare (786 km SSE), Dar es Salaam (1401 km ENE), Kampala (1446 km NNE). 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, Lusaka, is 426 km SSE on a bearing of 168°.

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.