Meteor showers from Sapporo in 2026

Meteor showers over Sapporo in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Sapporo, Hokkaido — 43.1°N, 141.35°E, 26 m, Asia/Tokyo — 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 146.9 an hour.

Clock time here runs 25 minutes behind mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 23:29 rather than 00:00. Sapporo, Hokkaido is the 194th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 1.97 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 22:41 on 14 December 2026 Sapporo time. Its radiant culminates 79.2° up at 01:37 bearing S, the Moon is 26% lit, and 22:00–06:00 is the window — about 146.9 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 82.7 an hour on 13 August (radiant 70.5° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 46.7 on 4 January (radiant 68.4°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Sapporo is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Southern delta-Aquariids manages 3.6 an hour on 31 July with the radiant reaching 31.0° at culmination.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Sapporo horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the mid-latitudes at 43.1°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Southern delta-Aquariids, at 31.0°.

Perseids (75.1° at culmination), Quadrantids (83.4° at culmination), Ursids (57.4° at culmination), October Draconids (77.2° at culmination) never set from 43.1°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 Sapporo at 16:00, astronomical darkness runs 17:42 to 05:15, and sunrise is 06:58 — 11 h 33 min of real darkness inside 14 h 59 min of night. These are Asia/Tokyo times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Sapporo runs from 5 h 30 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 11 h 35 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 Sapporo are Perseids (0% lit, 82.7/h).

Working against them, Quadrantids (100% lit), Orionids (77% lit), Ursids (97% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Sapporo

The closest other cities covered here are Tokyo (833 km S), Nagoya (957 km SSW), Osaka (1059 km SSW), Jilin (1195 km W), Harbin (1203 km WNW). 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.

Sapporo is isolated in this dataset — no other of the 300 cities lies within 500 km, and it is one of 5 covered in its country.

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.