Meteor showers from Shantou in 2026

Meteor showers over Shantou in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Shantou, Guangdong — 23.4°N, 116.68°E, 3 m, Asia/Shanghai — 12 of them put a radiant above the horizon in darkness at maximum, 3 pass ten an hour, and the Geminids tops the 2026 list at 35.3 an hour.

Clock time here runs 13 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:08 rather than 00:00. Shantou, Guangdong is the 82nd largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 3.84 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 21:41 on 14 December 2026 Shantou time. Its radiant culminates 81.1° up at 02:16 bearing N, the Moon is 26% lit, and 23:00–06:00 is the window — about 35.3 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 23.2 an hour on 13 August (radiant 53.8° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 10.6 on 4 January (radiant 49.4°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Shantou is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Southern delta-Aquariids manages 0.6 an hour on 31 July with the radiant reaching 50.7° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Northern Taurids at 1.4 an hour on 13 November.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Shantou horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 23.4°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 37.7°.

Ursids (37.7° at culmination) never sets from 23.4°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 Shantou at 17:29, astronomical darkness runs 18:49 to 05:26, and sunrise is 06:46 — 10 h 37 min of real darkness inside 13 h 18 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 Shantou runs from 8 h 2 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 10 h 37 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 Shantou are Perseids (0% lit, 23.2/h).

Working against them, Quadrantids (100% lit), Orionids (78% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Shantou

The closest other cities covered here are Xiamen (190 km NE), Huizhou (233 km W), Quanzhou (260 km NE), Shenzhen (282 km WSW), Hong Kong (283 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.

15 of the 300 cities lie within 500 km of here, and 92 share its country. The nearest, Xiamen, is 190 km NE on a bearing of 48°.

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.