Meteor showers from Almaty in 2026

Meteor showers over Almaty in 2026

Latitude 43.3°N, longitude 76.91°E, elevation 783 m, time zone Asia/Almaty: those four numbers decide most of what Almaty can see. 12 of the twelve annual showers get their radiant up in darkness at maximum here and 2 are worth a late night, led by the Geminids at 21.8 meteors an hour.

Clock time here runs 8 minutes behind mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 23:47 rather than 00:00. Almaty is the 191st largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 1.98 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 18:41 on 14 December 2026 Almaty time. Its radiant culminates 78.9° up at 01:55 bearing S, the Moon is 27% 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 18.1 an hour on 13 August (radiant 68.7° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 9.3 on 4 January (radiant 65.7°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Almaty 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 30.8° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Southern Taurids at 1.1 an hour on 5 November.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Almaty horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the mid-latitudes at 43.3°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Southern delta-Aquariids, at 30.8°.

Perseids (75.3° at culmination), Quadrantids (83.7° at culmination), October Draconids (77.4° at culmination), Ursids (57.6° at culmination) never set from 43.3°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 Almaty at 16:16, astronomical darkness runs 18:00 to 05:34, and sunrise is 07:17 — 11 h 34 min of real darkness inside 15 h 1 min of night. These are Asia/Almaty times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Almaty runs from 5 h 28 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 Almaty are Perseids (0% lit, 18.1/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 Almaty

The closest other cities covered here are Tashkent (670 km WSW), Ürümqi (863 km E), Astana (973 km NNW), Rawalpindi (1125 km SSW), Peshawar (1127 km SSW). 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.

Almaty is isolated in this dataset — no other of the 300 cities lies within 500 km, and it is one of 2 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.