Meteor showers from Yekaterinburg in 2026

Meteor showers over Yekaterinburg in 2026

Latitude 56.9°N, longitude 60.62°E, elevation 278 m, time zone Asia/Yekaterinburg: those four numbers decide most of what Yekaterinburg, Sverdlovsk Oblast can see. 12 of the twelve annual showers get their radiant up in darkness at maximum here and 2 are worth a late night, led by the Geminids at 12.5 meteors an hour.

Clock time here runs 58 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:52 rather than 00:00. Yekaterinburg, Sverdlovsk Oblast is the 279th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 1.50 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 18:41 on 14 December 2026 Yekaterinburg time. Its radiant culminates 65.3° up at 03:00 bearing S, the Moon is 27% lit, and 22:00–08:00 is the window — about 12.5 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 10.2 an hour on 13 August (radiant 68.2° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 8.4 on 4 January (radiant 75.7°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Yekaterinburg is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Southern delta-Aquariids manages 0.1 an hour on 31 July with the radiant reaching 17.2° 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 Yekaterinburg horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the higher mid-latitudes at 56.9°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Southern delta-Aquariids, at 17.2°.

Perseids (88.9° at culmination), Quadrantids (82.7° at culmination), April Lyrids (66.5° at culmination), October Draconids (89.0° at culmination), Ursids (71.3° at culmination) never set from 56.9°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 Yekaterinburg at 16:16, astronomical darkness runs 18:42 to 07:02, and sunrise is 09:28 — 12 h 20 min of real darkness inside 17 h 12 min of night. These are Asia/Yekaterinburg times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Yekaterinburg runs from 1 h 10 min on the Perseids night (13 August) to 12 h 22 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 Yekaterinburg are Perseids (0% lit, 10.2/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 Yekaterinburg

The closest other cities covered here are Astana (946 km SE), Novosibirsk (1398 km E), Moscow (1417 km W), Saint Petersburg (1782 km WNW), Tashkent (1840 km SSE). 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.

Yekaterinburg 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.