Meteor showers from Makkah in 2026

Meteor showers over Makkah in 2026

Latitude 21.4°N, longitude 39.83°E, elevation 333 m, time zone Asia/Riyadh: those four numbers decide most of what Makkah, Mecca Region 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 13.5 meteors an hour.

Clock time here runs 21 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:15 rather than 00:00. Makkah, Mecca Region is the 256th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 1.58 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 16:41 on 14 December 2026 Makkah time. Its radiant culminates 79.3° up at 02:24 bearing N, the Moon is 28% lit, and 23:00–06:00 is the window — about 13.5 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 10.2 an hour on 13 August (radiant 51.4° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 4.4 on 4 January (radiant 46.9°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Makkah is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 0.2 an hour on 23 December with the radiant reaching 35.9° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Leonids at 1.1 an hour on 18 November.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Makkah horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 21.4°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 35.9°.

Ursids (35.9° at culmination) never sets from 21.4°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 Makkah at 17:40, astronomical darkness runs 18:59 to 05:31, and sunrise is 06:50 — 10 h 31 min of real darkness inside 13 h 10 min of night. These are Asia/Riyadh times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Makkah runs from 8 h 12 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 10 h 32 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 Makkah are Perseids (0% lit, 10.2/h).

Near Makkah

The closest other cities covered here are Jeddah (67 km W), Riyadh (793 km ENE), Sanaa (818 km SE), Khartoum (1009 km SW), Basrah (1284 km NE). 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 3 share its country. The nearest, Jeddah, is 67 km W on a bearing of 276°.

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.