Meteor showers from Bamako in 2026

Meteor showers over Bamako in 2026

Latitude 12.6°N, longitude 7.98°W, elevation 374 m, time zone Africa/Bamako: those four numbers decide most of what Bamako 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 140.6 meteors an hour.

Clock time here runs 32 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:26 rather than 00:00. Bamako is the 74th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 4.23 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 13:41 on 14 December 2026 Bamako time. Its radiant culminates 70.5° up at 02:35 bearing N, the Moon is 29% lit, and 23:00–06:00 is the window — about 140.6 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 67.2 an hour on 13 August (radiant 42.2° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 22.1 on 3 January (radiant 38.3°, Moon 99%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Bamako is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 2.1 an hour on 22 December with the radiant reaching 27.1° at culmination.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Bamako horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 12.6°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 27.1°.

Nothing is circumpolar from 12.6°N among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Bamako rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Bamako at 18:08, astronomical darkness runs 19:24 to 05:29, and sunrise is 06:45 — 10 h 5 min of real darkness inside 12 h 37 min of night. These are Africa/Bamako times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Bamako runs from 8 h 48 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 10 h 5 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 Bamako are Perseids (0% lit, 67.2/h).

Working against them, Quadrantids (99% lit), Orionids (81% lit), eta-Aquariids (84% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Bamako

The closest other cities covered here are Ouagadougou (700 km E), Conakry (710 km WSW), Monrovia (767 km SSW), Abidjan (917 km SSE), Kumasi (958 km SE). 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.

Bamako 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

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.