Meteor showers from Baghdad in 2026

Meteor showers over Baghdad in 2026

Latitude 33.3°N, longitude 44.40°E, elevation 41 m, time zone Asia/Baghdad: those four numbers decide most of what Baghdad can see. 12 of the twelve annual showers get their radiant up in darkness at maximum here and 6 are worth a late night, led by the Geminids at 149.9 meteors an hour.

Clock time here runs 2 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 23:57 rather than 00:00. Baghdad is the 38th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 7.22 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 16:41 on 14 December 2026 Baghdad time. Its radiant culminates 88.8° up at 02:05 bearing S, the Moon is 28% lit, and 22:00–06:00 is the window — about 149.9 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 79.4 an hour on 13 August (radiant 59.3° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 35.8 on 4 January (radiant 58.4°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Baghdad is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Southern delta-Aquariids manages 3.4 an hour on 31 July with the radiant reaching 40.8° at culmination.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Baghdad horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the subtropics at 33.3°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Southern delta-Aquariids, at 40.8°.

Perseids (65.4° at culmination), Ursids (47.8° at culmination) never set from 33.3°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 Baghdad at 16:55, astronomical darkness runs 18:24 to 05:29, and sunrise is 06:58 — 11 h 5 min of real darkness inside 14 h 3 min of night. These are Asia/Baghdad times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Baghdad runs from 7 h 3 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 11 h 6 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 Baghdad are Perseids (0% lit, 79.4/h).

Working against them, Quadrantids (100% lit), Orionids (79% lit), eta-Aquariids (78% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Baghdad

The closest other cities covered here are Erbil (319 km N), Mosul (353 km NNW), Basrah (448 km SE), Diyarbakır (634 km NW), Isfahan (683 km E). 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.

3 of the 300 cities lie within 500 km of here, and 4 share its country. The nearest, Erbil, is 319 km N on a bearing of 354°.

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.