Meteor showers from Kaohsiung in 2026

Meteor showers over Kaohsiung in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Kaohsiung, Takao — 22.6°N, 120.31°E, 9 m, Asia/Taipei — 12 of them put a radiant above the horizon in darkness at maximum, 7 pass ten an hour, and the Geminids tops the 2026 list at 147.9 an hour.

Clock time here runs 1 minute behind mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 23:53 rather than 00:00. Kaohsiung, Takao is the 127th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 2.74 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 21:41 on 14 December 2026 Kaohsiung time. Its radiant culminates 80.4° up at 02:02 bearing N, the Moon is 26% lit, and 23:00–06:00 is the window — about 147.9 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 76.5 an hour on 13 August (radiant 53.7° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 36.1 on 4 January (radiant 50.9°, Moon 100%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Kaohsiung is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the October Draconids manages 3.6 an hour on 9 October with the radiant reaching 56.8° at culmination.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Kaohsiung horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 22.6°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 37.0°.

Ursids (37.0° at culmination) never sets from 22.6°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 Kaohsiung at 17:16, astronomical darkness runs 18:36 to 05:10, and sunrise is 06:30 — 10 h 35 min of real darkness inside 13 h 15 min of night. These are Asia/Taipei times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Kaohsiung runs from 8 h 6 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 10 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 Kaohsiung are Perseids (0% lit, 76.5/h).

Working against them, Quadrantids (100% lit), Orionids (78% lit), eta-Aquariids (79% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Kaohsiung

The closest other cities covered here are Taichung (174 km NNE), Taipei (298 km NNE), Xiamen (308 km NW), Quanzhou (310 km NW), Putian (341 km NNW). 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.

7 of the 300 cities lie within 500 km of here, and 3 share its country. The nearest, Taichung, is 174 km NNE on a bearing of 12°.

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.