Meteor showers from Santiago in 2026

Meteor showers over Santiago in 2026

Latitude 33.5°S, longitude 70.65°W, elevation 556 m, time zone America/Santiago: those four numbers decide most of what Santiago can see. 8 of the twelve annual showers get their radiant up in darkness at maximum here and 2 are worth a late night, led by the Geminids at 61.4 meteors an hour.

Clock time here runs 103 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 01:36 rather than 00:00. Santiago is the 59th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 4.84 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 10:41 on 14 December 2026 Santiago time. Its radiant culminates 24.3° up at 03:45 bearing N, the Moon is 22% lit, and 02:00–05:00 is the window — about 61.4 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Orionids manages 12.5 an hour on 21 October (radiant 40.9° at best, Moon 82% lit) and the April Lyrids 7.1 on 22 April (radiant 23.3°, Moon 40%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Santiago 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 -18.9° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Leonids at 2.4 an hour on 17 November.

What this latitude allows

Latitude decides what is available at all. From 33.5°S, Perseids, Ursids never lift a radiant above the Santiago horizon at maximum — the best any of them manages over the whole 24 hours is -1.5°, still under the horizon. Their radiants sit too far into the northern sky, and only travelling fixes that.

Nothing is circumpolar from 33.5°S among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Santiago rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Santiago at 20:47, astronomical darkness runs 22:30 to 04:43, and sunrise is 06:26 — 6 h 13 min of real darkness inside 9 h 40 min of night. These are America/Santiago times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Santiago runs from 6 h 11 min on the Ursids night (22 December) to 10 h 41 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, and 2026 is unkind to Santiago: none of the showers that clear five meteors an hour here peak with the Moon properly out of the way.

Working against them, Orionids (82% lit), eta-Aquariids (83% lit), Southern delta-Aquariids (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 Santiago

The closest other cities covered here are Córdoba (648 km ENE), Buenos Aires (1137 km E), Asunción (1551 km ENE), Porto Alegre (1872 km E), Santa Cruz de la Sierra (1895 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.

Santiago is isolated in this dataset — no other of the 300 cities lies within 500 km, and it is the only one 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.