Meteor showers from Kuala Lumpur in 2026

Meteor showers over Kuala Lumpur in 2026

Kuala Lumpur sits at 3.1°N, 101.69°E, 56 m above sea level, and keeps Asia/Kuala_Lumpur time. Of the twelve established showers on the annual calendar, 12 lift their radiant above this horizon during darkness on the night of maximum and 1 clear ten meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky. The Geminids leads, at 12.0 an hour.

Clock time here runs 73 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 01:07 rather than 00:00. Kuala Lumpur is the 291st largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 1.45 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 21:41 on 14 December 2026 Kuala Lumpur time. Its radiant culminates 60.9° up at 03:16 bearing N, the Moon is 26% lit, and 00:00–06:00 is the window — about 12.0 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 7.8 an hour on 13 August (radiant 33.9° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 3.8 on 4 January (radiant 24.6°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Kuala Lumpur is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 0.1 an hour on 23 December with the radiant reaching 17.5° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Orionids at 2.0 an hour on 22 October.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Kuala Lumpur horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 3.1°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 17.5°.

Nothing is circumpolar from 3.1°N among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Kuala Lumpur rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Kuala Lumpur at 19:06, astronomical darkness runs 20:20 to 05:55, and sunrise is 07:09 — 9 h 34 min of real darkness inside 12 h 4 min of night. These are Asia/Kuala_Lumpur times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Kuala Lumpur runs from 9 h 19 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 9 h 38 min on the Orionids night (22 October). 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 Kuala Lumpur are Perseids (0% lit, 7.8/h).

Near Kuala Lumpur

The closest other cities covered here are Singapore (316 km SE), Medan (339 km W), Palembang (755 km SSE), Cần Thơ (890 km NNE), Phnom Penh (1002 km NNE). 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.

2 of the 300 cities lie within 500 km of here, and Kuala Lumpur is the only one covered in its country. The nearest, Singapore, is 316 km SE on a bearing of 131°.

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.