Meteor showers from Chengdu in 2026

Meteor showers over Chengdu in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Chengdu, Sichuan — 30.7°N, 104.07°E, 499 m, Asia/Shanghai — 12 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 22.2 an hour.

Clock time here runs 64 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:58 rather than 00:00. Chengdu, Sichuan is the 9th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 13.57 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 21:41 on 14 December 2026 Chengdu time. Its radiant culminates 88.5° up at 03:07 bearing N, the Moon is 26% lit, and 23:00–07:00 is the window — about 22.2 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 17.3 an hour on 13 August (radiant 61.4° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 8.2 on 4 January (radiant 56.3°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Chengdu is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Southern delta-Aquariids manages 0.3 an hour on 31 July with the radiant reaching 43.4° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Southern Taurids at 1.3 an hour on 6 November.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Chengdu horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the subtropics at 30.7°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Southern delta-Aquariids, at 43.4°.

Ursids (45.0° at culmination) never sets from 30.7°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 Chengdu at 18:03, astronomical darkness runs 19:29 to 06:27, and sunrise is 07:53 — 10 h 58 min of real darkness inside 13 h 50 min of night. These are Asia/Shanghai times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Chengdu runs from 7 h 21 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 10 h 58 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 Chengdu are Perseids (0% lit, 17.3/h).

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

Near Chengdu

The closest other cities covered here are Mianyang (107 km NNE), Nanchong (193 km E), Chongqing (269 km ESE), Bazhong (287 km ENE), Dazhou (330 km ENE). 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.

7 of the 300 cities lie within 500 km of here, and 92 share its country. The nearest, Mianyang, is 107 km NNE on a bearing of 33°.

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.