Meteor showers from Multan in 2026

Meteor showers over Multan in 2026

Latitude 30.2°N, longitude 71.48°E, elevation 126 m, time zone Asia/Karachi: those four numbers decide most of what Multan, Punjab 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 149.6 meteors an hour.

Clock time here runs 14 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:08 rather than 00:00. Multan, Punjab is the 169th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 2.17 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 18:41 on 14 December 2026 Multan time. Its radiant culminates 88.0° up at 02:17 bearing N, the Moon is 27% lit, and 23:00–06:00 is the window — about 149.6 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 82.3 an hour on 13 August (radiant 60.3° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 32.9 on 4 January (radiant 54.4°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Multan is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Southern delta-Aquariids manages 3.6 an hour on 31 July with the radiant reaching 43.9° at culmination.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Multan horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the subtropics at 30.2°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Southern delta-Aquariids, at 43.9°.

Ursids (44.6° at culmination) never sets from 30.2°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 Multan at 17:15, astronomical darkness runs 18:40 to 05:37, and sunrise is 07:02 — 10 h 56 min of real darkness inside 13 h 47 min of night. These are Asia/Karachi times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Multan runs from 7 h 24 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 10 h 57 min on the Ursids night (23 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 Multan are Perseids (0% lit, 82.3/h).

Working against them, Quadrantids (100% lit), Orionids (79% lit), eta-Aquariids (78% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Multan

The closest other cities covered here are Faisalabad (205 km NE), Lahore (313 km ENE), Gujranwala (337 km NE), Rawalpindi (406 km NNE), Peshawar (424 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.

7 of the 300 cities lie within 500 km of here, and 9 share its country. The nearest, Faisalabad, is 205 km NE on a bearing of 48°.

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.