Meteor showers from Chennai in 2026

Meteor showers over Chennai in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Chennai, Tamil Nadu — 13.1°N, 80.28°E, 14 m, Asia/Kolkata — 12 of them put a radiant above the horizon in darkness at maximum, 5 pass ten an hour, and the Geminids tops the 2026 list at 141.6 an hour.

Clock time here runs 9 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:03 rather than 00:00. Chennai, Tamil Nadu is the 64th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 4.68 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 19:11 on 14 December 2026 Chennai time. Its radiant culminates 70.9° up at 02:12 bearing N, the Moon is 27% lit, and 23:00–06:00 is the window — about 141.6 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 64.4 an hour on 13 August (radiant 43.9° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 29.3 on 4 January (radiant 41.8°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Chennai is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the October Draconids manages 2.6 an hour on 9 October with the radiant reaching 47.2° at culmination.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Chennai horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 13.1°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 27.5°.

Nothing is circumpolar from 13.1°N among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Chennai rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Chennai at 17:44, astronomical darkness runs 19:00 to 05:06, and sunrise is 06:22 — 10 h 7 min of real darkness inside 12 h 39 min of night. These are Asia/Kolkata times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Chennai runs from 8 h 46 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 10 h 7 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 Chennai are Perseids (0% lit, 64.4/h).

Working against them, Quadrantids (100% lit), Orionids (79% 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 Chennai

The closest other cities covered here are Kallakurichi (208 km SW), Bengaluru (291 km W), Madurai (424 km SW), Coimbatore (428 km WSW), Hyderabad (516 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.

4 of the 300 cities lie within 500 km of here, and 24 share its country. The nearest, Kallakurichi, is 208 km SW on a bearing of 224°.

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.