Meteor showers from London in 2026

Meteor showers over London in 2026

London, England sits at 51.5°N, 0.13°W, 25 m above sea level, and keeps Europe/London 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 6 clear ten meteors an hour on the reference sky. The Geminids leads, at 141.5 an hour.

Clock time here runs 1 minute ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 23:55 rather than 00:00. London, England is the 28th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 8.96 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 13:41 on 14 December 2026 London time. Its radiant culminates 70.6° up at 02:03 bearing S, the Moon is 29% lit, and 22:00–06:00 is the window — about 141.5 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 84.4 an hour on 13 August (radiant 73.3° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 52.2 on 3 January (radiant 76.3°, Moon 99%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for London is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the eta-Aquariids manages 1.2 an hour on 6 May with the radiant reaching 38.1° at culmination.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the London horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the higher mid-latitudes at 51.5°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Southern delta-Aquariids, at 22.6°.

Perseids (83.5° at culmination), Quadrantids (88.0° at culmination), Ursids (66.0° at culmination), October Draconids (85.6° at culmination) never set from 51.5°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 London at 15:51, astronomical darkness runs 17:55 to 05:55, and sunrise is 07:59 — 12 hours of real darkness inside 16 h 8 min of night. These are Europe/London times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at London runs from 2 h 50 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 12 h 2 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 London are Perseids (0% lit, 84.4/h).

Working against them, Quadrantids (99% lit), Orionids (80% lit), Ursids (98% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near London

The closest other cities covered here are Paris (344 km SSE), Hamburg (720 km ENE), Munich (918 km ESE), Berlin (932 km ENE), Barcelona (1139 km S). 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 London is the only one covered in its country. The nearest, Paris, is 344 km SSE on a bearing of 148°.

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.