Meteor showers from Mbuji-Mayi in 2026

Meteor showers over Mbuji-Mayi in 2026

Latitude 6.1°S, longitude 23.59°E, elevation 621 m, time zone Africa/Lubumbashi: those four numbers decide most of what Mbuji-Mayi, East Kasai can see. 12 of the twelve annual showers get their radiant up in darkness at maximum here and 5 are worth a late night, led by the Geminids at 116.7 meteors an hour.

Clock time here runs 26 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:20 rather than 00:00. Mbuji-Mayi, East Kasai is the 178th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 2.10 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 15:41 on 14 December 2026 Mbuji-Mayi time. Its radiant culminates 51.7° up at 02:29 bearing N, the Moon is 28% lit, and 00:00–05:00 is the window — about 116.7 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 41.0 an hour on 13 August (radiant 25.8° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Orionids 18.2 on 21 October (radiant 68.0°, Moon 80%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Mbuji-Mayi is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 0.1 an hour on 23 December with the radiant reaching 8.3° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the October Draconids at 1.4 an hour on 9 October.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Mbuji-Mayi horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 6.1°S, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 8.3°.

Nothing is circumpolar from 6.1°S among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Mbuji-Mayi rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Mbuji-Mayi at 18:34, astronomical darkness runs 19:50 to 04:50, and sunrise is 06:06 — 8 h 59 min of real darkness inside 11 h 32 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 Mbuji-Mayi runs from 8 h 59 min on the Ursids night (23 December) to 9 h 44 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 Mbuji-Mayi are Perseids (0% lit, 41.0/h).

Working against them, Orionids (80% lit), Quadrantids (100% lit), eta-Aquariids (85% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Mbuji-Mayi

The closest other cities covered here are Lubumbashi (748 km SE), Kinshasa (938 km WNW), Brazzaville (943 km WNW), Lusaka (1151 km SSE), Luanda (1180 km WSW). 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.

Mbuji-Mayi is isolated in this dataset — no other of the 300 cities lies within 500 km, and it is one of 3 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.