Meteor showers from Dar es Salaam in 2026

Meteor showers over Dar es Salaam in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Dar es Salaam — 6.8°S, 39.27°E, 24 m, Africa/Dar_es_Salaam — 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 27.6 an hour.

Clock time here runs 23 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:17 rather than 00:00. Dar es Salaam is the 51st largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 5.38 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 16:41 on 14 December 2026 Dar es Salaam time. Its radiant culminates 51.0° up at 02:26 bearing N, the Moon is 28% lit, and 00:00–05:00 is the window — about 27.6 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 12.3 an hour on 13 August (radiant 25.2° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Orionids 4.6 on 21 October (radiant 67.2°, Moon 79%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Dar es Salaam is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 0.0 an hour on 23 December with the radiant reaching 7.6° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Northern Taurids at 1.2 an hour on 12 November.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Dar es Salaam horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 6.8°S, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 7.6°.

Nothing is circumpolar from 6.8°S among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Dar es Salaam rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Dar es Salaam at 18:33, astronomical darkness runs 19:49 to 04:45, and sunrise is 06:02 — 8 h 57 min of real darkness inside 11 h 29 min of night. These are Africa/Dar_es_Salaam times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Dar es Salaam runs from 8 h 56 min on the Ursids night (23 December) to 9 h 46 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July). 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 Dar es Salaam are Perseids (0% lit, 12.3/h).

Near Dar es Salaam

The closest other cities covered here are Nairobi (673 km NNW), Kakamega (936 km NNW), Kampala (1087 km NW), Mogadishu (1194 km NE), Lubumbashi (1401 km WSW). 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.

Dar es Salaam 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.