Meteor showers from Nairobi in 2026

Meteor showers over Nairobi in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Nairobi — 1.3°S, 36.82°E, 1684 m, Africa/Nairobi — 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 124.5 an hour.

Clock time here runs 33 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:27 rather than 00:00. Nairobi is the 70th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 4.40 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 16:41 on 14 December 2026 Nairobi time. Its radiant culminates 56.5° up at 02:36 bearing N, the Moon is 28% lit, and 00:00–06:00 is the window — about 124.5 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 47.9 an hour on 13 August (radiant 30.6° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Orionids 19.1 on 21 October (radiant 73.0°, Moon 79%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Nairobi is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 0.8 an hour on 23 December with the radiant reaching 13.2° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the October Draconids at 1.8 an hour on 9 October.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Nairobi horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 1.3°S, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 13.2°.

Nothing is circumpolar from 1.3°S among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Nairobi rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Nairobi at 18:32, astronomical darkness runs 19:48 to 05:06, and sunrise is 06:22 — 9 h 18 min of real darkness inside 11 h 49 min of night. These are Africa/Nairobi times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Nairobi runs from 9 h 18 min on the Ursids night (23 December) to 9 h 35 min on the April Lyrids night (22 April). 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 Nairobi are Perseids (0% lit, 47.9/h).

Working against them, Orionids (79% lit), Quadrantids (100% 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 Nairobi

The closest other cities covered here are Kakamega (288 km NW), Kampala (503 km WNW), Dar es Salaam (673 km SSE), Mogadishu (1017 km ENE), Addis Ababa (1166 km N). 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.

1 of the 300 cities lie within 500 km of here, and 2 share its country. The nearest, Kakamega, is 288 km NW on a bearing of 307°.

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.