Meteor showers from Berlin in 2026

Meteor showers over Berlin in 2026

Latitude 52.5°N, longitude 13.41°E, elevation 74 m, time zone Europe/Berlin: those four numbers decide most of what Berlin can see. 12 of the twelve annual showers get their radiant up in darkness at maximum here and 3 are worth a late night, led by the Geminids at 20.8 meteors an hour.

Clock time here runs 6 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:01 rather than 00:00. Berlin is the 93rd largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 3.43 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 14:41 on 14 December 2026 Berlin time. Its radiant culminates 69.6° up at 02:09 bearing S, the Moon is 28% lit, and 22:00–07:00 is the window — about 20.8 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 17.4 an hour on 13 August (radiant 73.1° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 11.6 on 3 January (radiant 75.4°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Berlin is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the eta-Aquariids manages 0.2 an hour on 6 May with the radiant reaching 37.1° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Southern Taurids at 1.0 an hour on 5 November.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Berlin horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the higher mid-latitudes at 52.5°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Southern delta-Aquariids, at 21.6°.

Perseids (84.5° at culmination), Quadrantids (87.0° at culmination), Ursids (67.0° at culmination), October Draconids (86.7° at culmination) never set from 52.5°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 Berlin at 15:51, astronomical darkness runs 17:59 to 06:03, and sunrise is 08:10 — 12 h 4 min of real darkness inside 16 h 19 min of night. These are Europe/Berlin times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Berlin runs from 2 h 10 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 12 h 6 min on the Ursids night (22 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 Berlin are Perseids (0% lit, 17.4/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 Berlin

The closest other cities covered here are Hamburg (255 km WNW), Munich (505 km SSW), Warsaw (517 km E), Vienna (524 km SSE), Budapest (688 km SE). 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 3 share its country. The nearest, Hamburg, is 255 km WNW on a bearing of 298°.

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.