Meteor showers from Mexico City in 2026

Meteor showers over Mexico City in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Mexico City — 19.4°N, 99.13°W, 2240 m, America/Mexico_City — 12 of them put a radiant above the horizon in darkness at maximum, 2 pass ten an hour, and the Geminids tops the 2026 list at 13.4 an hour.

Clock time here runs 37 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:30 rather than 00:00. Mexico City is the 13th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 12.29 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 07:41 on 14 December 2026 Mexico City time. Its radiant culminates 77.1° up at 02:39 bearing N, the Moon is 23% lit, and 23:00–06:00 is the window — about 13.4 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 10.1 an hour on 12 August (radiant 48.4° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 4.3 on 3 January (radiant 43.1°, Moon 99%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Mexico City is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 0.2 an hour on 22 December with the radiant reaching 34.0° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Leonids at 1.1 an hour on 17 November.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Mexico City horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 19.4°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 34.0°.

Ursids (34.0° at culmination) never sets from 19.4°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 Mexico City at 17:59, astronomical darkness runs 19:18 to 05:43, and sunrise is 07:02 — 10 h 25 min of real darkness inside 13 h 3 min of night. These are America/Mexico_City times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Mexico City runs from 8 h 20 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 10 h 26 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 Mexico City are Perseids (0% lit, 10.1/h).

Near Mexico City

The closest other cities covered here are Puebla (105 km ESE), Santiago de Querétaro (184 km NW), León de los Aldama (326 km NW), Guadalajara (462 km WNW), San Antonio (1113 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.

4 of the 300 cities lie within 500 km of here, and 7 share its country. The nearest, Puebla, is 105 km ESE on a bearing of 114°.

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.