Meteor showers from Rome in 2026

Meteor showers over Rome in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Rome, Lazio — 41.9°N, 12.51°E, 20 m, Europe/Rome — 12 of them put a radiant above the horizon in darkness at maximum, 3 pass ten an hour, and the Geminids tops the 2026 list at 21.8 an hour.

Clock time here runs 10 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:04 rather than 00:00. Rome, Lazio is the 156th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 2.32 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 14:41 on 14 December 2026 Rome time. Its radiant culminates 80.3° up at 02:13 bearing S, the Moon is 28% lit, and 22:00–06:00 is the window — about 21.8 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 17.5 an hour on 13 August (radiant 65.6° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 10.4 on 3 January (radiant 71.8°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Rome is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Southern delta-Aquariids manages 0.3 an hour on 31 July with the radiant reaching 32.2° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Southern Taurids at 1.2 an hour on 5 November.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Rome horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the mid-latitudes at 41.9°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Southern delta-Aquariids, at 32.2°.

Perseids (73.9° at culmination), Quadrantids (82.4° at culmination), October Draconids (76.0° at culmination), Ursids (56.4° at culmination) never set from 41.9°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 Rome at 16:39, astronomical darkness runs 18:19 to 05:49, and sunrise is 07:30 — 11 h 30 min of real darkness inside 14 h 51 min of night. These are Europe/Rome times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Rome runs from 5 h 45 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 11 h 31 min on the Ursids night (22 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 Rome are Perseids (0% lit, 17.5/h).

Working against them, Quadrantids (100% lit) runs into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Rome

The closest other cities covered here are Munich (698 km N), Vienna (765 km NNE), Budapest (809 km NE), Barcelona (862 km W), Algiers (992 km WSW). 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.

Rome is isolated in this dataset — no other of the 300 cities lies within 500 km, and it is the only one covered in its country.

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.