Meteor showers from Kunming in 2026

Meteor showers over Kunming in 2026

Kunming, Yunnan sits at 25.0°N, 102.72°E, 1895 m above sea level, and keeps Asia/Shanghai 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 22.0 an hour.

Clock time here runs 69 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 01:03 rather than 00:00. Kunming, Yunnan is the 79th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 3.86 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 21:41 on 14 December 2026 Kunming time. Its radiant culminates 82.8° up at 03:12 bearing N, the Moon is 26% lit, and 00:00–07:00 is the window — about 22.0 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 16.1 an hour on 13 August (radiant 55.6° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 7.6 on 4 January (radiant 51.3°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Kunming is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Southern delta-Aquariids manages 0.4 an hour on 31 July with the radiant reaching 49.0° 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 Kunming horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the subtropics at 25.0°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 39.4°.

Ursids (39.4° at culmination) never sets from 25.0°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 Kunming at 18:21, astronomical darkness runs 19:43 to 06:24, and sunrise is 07:46 — 10 h 42 min of real darkness inside 13 h 26 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 Kunming runs from 7 h 54 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 10 h 42 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 Kunming are Perseids (0% lit, 16.1/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 Kunming

The closest other cities covered here are Guiyang (435 km ENE), Zunyi (511 km NE), Hanoi (549 km SE), Haiphong (617 km SE), Nanning (620 km ESE). 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 92 share its country. The nearest, Guiyang, is 435 km ENE on a bearing of 66°.

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.