Meteor showers from Lima in 2026

Meteor showers over Lima in 2026

Lima sits at 12.0°S, 77.03°W, 152 m above sea level, and keeps America/Lima time. Of the twelve established showers on the annual calendar, 11 lift their radiant above this horizon during darkness on the night of maximum and 5 clear ten meteors an hour on the reference sky. The Geminids leads, at 107.1 an hour.

Clock time here runs 8 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:02 rather than 00:00. Lima is the 34th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 7.74 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 08:41 on 14 December 2026 Lima time. Its radiant culminates 45.7° up at 02:11 bearing N, the Moon is 22% lit, and 23:00–05:00 is the window — about 107.1 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 32.5 an hour on 12 August (radiant 19.9° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Orionids 17.6 on 21 October (radiant 61.4°, Moon 82%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Lima is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 0.0 an hour on 22 December with the radiant reaching 2.5° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Quadrantids at 3.7 an hour on 3 January.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Lima horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 12.0°S, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 2.5°.

Nothing is circumpolar from 12.0°S among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Lima rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Lima at 18:27, astronomical darkness runs 19:45 to 04:19, and sunrise is 05:38 — 8 h 34 min of real darkness inside 11 h 11 min of night. These are America/Lima times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Lima runs from 8 h 33 min on the Ursids night (22 December) to 9 h 58 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July). 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 Lima are Perseids (0% lit, 32.5/h).

Working against them, Orionids (82% lit), eta-Aquariids (83% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Lima

The closest other cities covered here are La Paz (1077 km ESE), Guayaquil (1139 km NNW), Quito (1324 km N), Santa Cruz de la Sierra (1618 km ESE), Cali (1722 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.

Lima 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.