Meteor showers from Patna in 2026

Meteor showers over Patna in 2026

Latitude 25.6°N, longitude 85.14°E, elevation 53 m, time zone Asia/Kolkata: those four numbers decide most of what Patna, Bihar 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 35.5 meteors an hour.

Clock time here runs 11 minutes behind mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 23:44 rather than 00:00. Patna, Bihar is the 234th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 1.68 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 19:11 on 14 December 2026 Patna time. Its radiant culminates 83.4° up at 01:52 bearing N, the Moon is 27% lit, and 22:00–06:00 is the window — about 35.5 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 24.0 an hour on 13 August (radiant 53.4° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 12.6 on 4 January (radiant 54.6°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Patna is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Southern delta-Aquariids manages 0.6 an hour on 31 July with the radiant reaching 48.5° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Ursids at 1.0 an hour on 23 December.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Patna horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the subtropics at 25.6°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 40.0°.

Ursids (40.0° at culmination) never sets from 25.6°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 Patna at 17:00, astronomical darkness runs 18:22 to 05:05, and sunrise is 06:27 — 10 h 43 min of real darkness inside 13 h 27 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 Patna runs from 7 h 51 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 10 h 44 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 Patna are Perseids (0% lit, 24.0/h).

Working against them, Quadrantids (100% lit), Orionids (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 Patna

The closest other cities covered here are Kathmandu (235 km N), Lucknow (442 km WNW), Kolkata (470 km SE), Kanpur (488 km WNW), Khulna (545 km ESE). 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, Kathmandu, is 235 km N on a bearing of 4°.

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.