Meteor showers from Bandung in 2026

Meteor showers over Bandung in 2026

Latitude 6.9°S, longitude 107.61°E, elevation 714 m, time zone Asia/Jakarta: those four numbers decide most of what Bandung, West Java can see. 12 of the twelve annual showers get their radiant up in darkness at maximum here and 5 are worth a late night, led by the Geminids at 116.3 meteors an hour.

Clock time here runs 10 minutes behind mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 23:44 rather than 00:00. Bandung, West Java is the 140th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 2.53 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 20:41 on 14 December 2026 Bandung time. Its radiant culminates 50.9° up at 01:53 bearing N, the Moon is 26% lit, and 23:00–05:00 is the window — about 116.3 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 37.9 an hour on 13 August (radiant 24.7° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Orionids 18.4 on 22 October (radiant 67.3°, Moon 78%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Bandung is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 0.0 an hour on 23 December with the radiant reaching 7.4° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the October Draconids at 1.6 an hour on 9 October.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Bandung horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 6.9°S, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 7.4°.

Nothing is circumpolar from 6.9°S among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Bandung rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Bandung at 17:59, astronomical darkness runs 19:16 to 04:12, and sunrise is 05:28 — 8 h 56 min of real darkness inside 11 h 29 min of night. These are Asia/Jakarta times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Bandung runs from 8 h 56 min on the Ursids night (23 December) to 9 h 46 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July). 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 Bandung are Perseids (0% lit, 37.9/h).

Working against them, Orionids (78% lit), Quadrantids (100% 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 Bandung

The closest other cities covered here are Jakarta (115 km NW), Semarang (311 km E), Palembang (547 km NW), Surabaya (569 km E), Singapore (1004 km NNW). 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.

2 of the 300 cities lie within 500 km of here, and 7 share its country. The nearest, Jakarta, is 115 km NW on a bearing of 313°.

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.