Meteor showers from Dakar in 2026

Meteor showers over Dakar in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Dakar — 14.7°N, 17.44°W, 12 m, Africa/Dakar — 12 of them put a radiant above the horizon in darkness at maximum, 2 pass ten an hour, and the Geminids tops the 2026 list at 34.1 an hour.

Clock time here runs 70 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 01:04 rather than 00:00. Dakar is the 135th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 2.65 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 13:41 on 14 December 2026 Dakar time. Its radiant culminates 72.5° up at 03:13 bearing N, the Moon is 29% lit, and 00:00–07:00 is the window — about 34.1 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 20.3 an hour on 13 August (radiant 45.4° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 9.0 on 3 January (radiant 43.1°, Moon 99%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Dakar is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 0.6 an hour on 22 December with the radiant reaching 29.2° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Northern Taurids at 1.4 an hour on 12 November.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Dakar horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 14.7°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 29.2°.

Ursids (29.2° at culmination) never sets from 14.7°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 Dakar at 18:42, astronomical darkness runs 19:58 to 06:10, and sunrise is 07:26 — 10 h 11 min of real darkness inside 12 h 44 min of night. These are Africa/Dakar times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Dakar runs from 8 h 41 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 10 h 12 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 Dakar are Perseids (0% lit, 20.3/h).

Working against them, Quadrantids (99% lit), Orionids (81% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Dakar

The closest other cities covered here are Conakry (704 km SE), Bamako (1049 km ESE), Monrovia (1182 km SE), Ouagadougou (1739 km E), Abidjan (1800 km SE). 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.

Dakar is isolated in this dataset — no other of the 300 cities lies within 500 km, and it is the only one 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.