Meteor showers from Tirunelveli in 2026

Meteor showers over Tirunelveli in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu — 8.7°N, 77.68°E, 49 m, Asia/Kolkata — 12 of them put a radiant above the horizon in darkness at maximum, 6 pass ten an hour, and the Geminids tops the 2026 list at 137.0 an hour.

Clock time here runs 19 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:13 rather than 00:00. Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu is the 300th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 1.44 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 19:11 on 14 December 2026 Tirunelveli time. Its radiant culminates 66.5° up at 02:22 bearing N, the Moon is 27% lit, and 23:00–06:00 is the window — about 137.0 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 57.6 an hour on 13 August (radiant 39.2° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 24.9 on 4 January (radiant 36.7°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Tirunelveli is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 2.3 an hour on 23 December with the radiant reaching 23.1° at culmination.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Tirunelveli horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 8.7°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 23.1°.

Nothing is circumpolar from 8.7°N among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Tirunelveli rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Tirunelveli at 18:02, astronomical darkness runs 19:17 to 05:10, and sunrise is 06:25 — 9 h 53 min of real darkness inside 12 h 23 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 Tirunelveli runs from 9 h 2 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 9 h 53 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 Tirunelveli are Perseids (0% lit, 57.6/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 Tirunelveli

The closest other cities covered here are Madurai (141 km NNE), Coimbatore (265 km NNW), Kallakurichi (362 km NNE), Bengaluru (472 km N), Chennai (562 km NNE). 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, Madurai, is 141 km NNE on a bearing of 20°.

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.