Meteor showers from Chicago in 2026

Meteor showers over Chicago in 2026

Chicago, Illinois sits at 41.9°N, 87.65°W, 179 m above sea level, and keeps America/Chicago time. Of the twelve established showers on the annual calendar, 12 lift their radiant above this horizon during darkness on the night of maximum and 2 clear ten meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky. The Geminids leads, at 13.6 an hour.

Clock time here runs 9 minutes behind mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 23:45 rather than 00:00. Chicago, Illinois is the 133rd largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 2.66 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 07:41 on 14 December 2026 Chicago time. Its radiant culminates 80.4° up at 01:53 bearing S, the Moon is 23% lit, and 22:00–06:00 is the window — about 13.6 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 12.1 an hour on 12 August (radiant 67.6° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 5.9 on 3 January (radiant 65.3°, Moon 99%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Chicago is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Southern delta-Aquariids manages 0.2 an hour on 31 July with the radiant reaching 32.1° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Leonids at 1.1 an hour on 17 November.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Chicago horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the mid-latitudes at 41.9°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Southern delta-Aquariids, at 32.1°.

Perseids (73.8° at culmination), Quadrantids (82.4° at culmination), October Draconids (76.0° at culmination), Ursids (56.4° at culmination) never set from 41.9°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 Chicago at 16:19, astronomical darkness runs 18:00 to 05:29, and sunrise is 07:10 — 11 h 29 min of real darkness inside 14 h 51 min of night. These are America/Chicago times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Chicago runs from 5 h 43 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 11 h 31 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 Chicago are Perseids (0% lit, 12.1/h).

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

Near Chicago

The closest other cities covered here are Toronto (704 km ENE), Philadelphia (1069 km E), New York City (1146 km E), Montréal (1200 km ENE), Houston (1512 km SSW). 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.

Chicago is isolated in this dataset — no other of the 300 cities lies within 500 km, and it is one of 7 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.