Meteor showers from Saint Petersburg in 2026

Meteor showers over Saint Petersburg in 2026

Saint Petersburg, St.-Petersburg sits at 59.9°N, 30.31°E, 11 m above sea level, and keeps Europe/Moscow 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 12.2 an hour.

Clock time here runs 59 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:53 rather than 00:00. Saint Petersburg, St.-Petersburg is the 52nd largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 5.35 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 16:41 on 14 December 2026 Saint Petersburg time. Its radiant culminates 62.2° up at 03:02 bearing S, the Moon is 28% lit, and 22:00–08:00 is the window — about 12.2 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Quadrantids manages 8.2 an hour on 4 January (radiant 79.1° at best, Moon 100% lit) and the Perseids 5.2 on 13 August (radiant 68.9°, Moon 0%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Saint Petersburg is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Southern delta-Aquariids manages 0.0 an hour on 31 July with the radiant reaching 14.2° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Leonids at 1.0 an hour on 18 November.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Saint Petersburg horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the higher mid-latitudes at 59.9°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Southern delta-Aquariids, at 14.2°.

Geminids (62.2° at culmination), Quadrantids (79.6° at culmination), Perseids (88.1° at culmination), April Lyrids (63.4° at culmination), October Draconids (85.9° at culmination), Ursids (74.4° at culmination) never set from 59.9°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 Saint Petersburg at 15:52, astronomical darkness runs 18:37 to 07:10, and sunrise is 09:55 — 12 h 33 min of real darkness inside 18 h 3 min of night. These are Europe/Moscow times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Saint Petersburg runs from 8 h 34 min on the October Draconids night (9 October) to 12 h 35 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 Saint Petersburg are Perseids (0% lit, 5.2/h).

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

Near Saint Petersburg

The closest other cities covered here are Moscow (635 km SE), Stockholm (691 km W), Minsk (692 km SSW), Warsaw (1031 km SW), Kyiv (1055 km S). 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.

Saint Petersburg is isolated in this dataset — no other of the 300 cities lies within 500 km, and it is one of 4 covered in its country.

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.