Meteor showers from Ürümqi in 2026

Meteor showers over Ürümqi in 2026

Latitude 43.8°N, longitude 87.60°E, elevation 862 m, time zone Asia/Urumqi: those four numbers decide most of what Ürümqi, Xinjiang can see. 12 of the twelve annual showers get their radiant up in darkness at maximum here and 6 are worth a late night, led by the Geminids at 146.8 meteors an hour.

Clock time here runs 10 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:04 rather than 00:00. Ürümqi, Xinjiang is the 109th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 3.03 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 19:41 on 14 December 2026 Ürümqi time. Its radiant culminates 78.4° up at 02:12 bearing S, the Moon is 27% lit, and 22:00–06:00 is the window — about 146.8 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 86.2 an hour on 13 August (radiant 67.1° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 52.2 on 4 January (radiant 72.8°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Ürümqi is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Southern delta-Aquariids manages 3.4 an hour on 31 July with the radiant reaching 30.3° at culmination.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Ürümqi horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the mid-latitudes at 43.8°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Southern delta-Aquariids, at 30.3°.

Perseids (75.8° at culmination), Quadrantids (84.2° at culmination), Ursids (58.2° at culmination), October Draconids (77.9° at culmination) never set from 43.8°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 Ürümqi at 16:32, astronomical darkness runs 18:16 to 05:52, and sunrise is 07:36 — 11 h 35 min of real darkness inside 15 h 4 min of night. These are Asia/Urumqi times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Ürümqi runs from 5 h 21 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 11 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 Ürümqi are Perseids (0% lit, 86.2/h).

Working against them, Quadrantids (100% lit), Orionids (78% lit), eta-Aquariids (79% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Ürümqi

The closest other cities covered here are Almaty (863 km W), Novosibirsk (1292 km NNW), Xining (1440 km ESE), Astana (1460 km NW), Tashkent (1529 km W). 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.

Ürümqi is isolated in this dataset — no other of the 300 cities lies within 500 km, and it is one of 92 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.