Meteor showers from Benin City in 2026

Meteor showers over Benin City in 2026

Benin City, Edo State sits at 6.3°N, 5.63°E, 88 m above sea level, and keeps Africa/Lagos 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 5 clear ten meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky. The Geminids leads, at 83.5 an hour.

Clock time here runs 37 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:32 rather than 00:00. Benin City, Edo State is the 219th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 1.78 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 14:41 on 14 December 2026 Benin City time. Its radiant culminates 64.2° up at 02:41 bearing N, the Moon is 28% lit, and 23:00–06:00 is the window — about 83.5 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 39.4 an hour on 13 August (radiant 38.1° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 12.9 on 3 January (radiant 32.3°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Benin City is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 0.9 an hour on 22 December with the radiant reaching 20.8° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the October Draconids at 1.5 an hour on 9 October.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Benin City horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 6.3°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 20.8°.

Nothing is circumpolar from 6.3°N among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Benin City rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Benin City at 18:24, astronomical darkness runs 19:39 to 05:24, and sunrise is 06:39 — 9 h 45 min of real darkness inside 12 h 15 min of night. These are Africa/Lagos times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Benin City runs from 9 h 10 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 9 h 45 min on the Quadrantids night (3 January). 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 Benin City are Perseids (0% lit, 39.4/h).

Working against them, Quadrantids (100% lit), Orionids (80% 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 Benin City

The closest other cities covered here are Onitsha (130 km E), Ibadan (222 km WNW), Port Harcourt (232 km SE), Lagos (247 km W), Abuja (366 km NE). 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.

6 of the 300 cities lie within 500 km of here, and 8 share its country. The nearest, Onitsha, is 130 km E on a bearing of 99°.

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.