Meteor showers from Warsaw in 2026

Meteor showers over Warsaw in 2026

Latitude 52.2°N, longitude 21.01°E, elevation 113 m, time zone Europe/Warsaw: those four numbers decide most of what Warsaw, Mazovia 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 140.6 meteors an hour.

Clock time here runs 24 minutes behind mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 23:30 rather than 00:00. Warsaw, Mazovia is the 229th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 1.70 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 14:41 on 14 December 2026 Warsaw time. Its radiant culminates 69.9° up at 01:39 bearing S, the Moon is 28% lit, and 21:00–06:00 is the window — about 140.6 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 80.4 an hour on 13 August (radiant 69.0° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 44.6 on 3 January (radiant 80.0°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Warsaw is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the eta-Aquariids manages 0.8 an hour on 6 May with the radiant reaching 37.4° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Southern delta-Aquariids at 3.1 an hour on 31 July.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Warsaw horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the higher mid-latitudes at 52.2°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Southern delta-Aquariids, at 21.9°.

Perseids (84.2° at culmination), Quadrantids (87.3° at culmination), Ursids (66.7° at culmination), October Draconids (86.4° at culmination) never set from 52.2°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 Warsaw at 15:23, astronomical darkness runs 17:29 to 05:32, and sunrise is 07:38 — 12 h 3 min of real darkness inside 16 h 16 min of night. These are Europe/Warsaw times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Warsaw runs from 2 h 23 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 12 h 5 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 Warsaw are Perseids (0% lit, 80.4/h).

Working against them, Quadrantids (100% lit), Orionids (80% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Warsaw

The closest other cities covered here are Minsk (476 km ENE), Berlin (517 km W), Budapest (545 km SSW), Vienna (556 km SW), Kyiv (689 km ESE). 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.

1 of the 300 cities lie within 500 km of here, and Warsaw is the only one covered in its country. The nearest, Minsk, is 476 km ENE on a bearing of 64°.

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.