Meteor showers from Houston in 2026

Meteor showers over Houston in 2026

Houston, Texas sits at 29.8°N, 95.36°W, 12 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 7 clear ten meteors an hour on the reference sky. The Geminids leads, at 149.2 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. Houston, Texas is the 157th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 2.31 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 07:41 on 14 December 2026 Houston time. Its radiant culminates 87.5° up at 02:24 bearing N, the Moon is 23% lit, and 23:00–06:00 is the window — about 149.2 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 81.0 an hour on 12 August (radiant 59.3° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 28.2 on 3 January (radiant 53.0°, Moon 99%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Houston is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 2.9 an hour on 22 December with the radiant reaching 44.3° at culmination.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Houston horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the subtropics at 29.8°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Southern delta-Aquariids, at 44.2°.

Ursids (44.3° at culmination) never sets from 29.8°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 Houston at 17:23, astronomical darkness runs 18:48 to 05:43, and sunrise is 07:08 — 10 h 55 min of real darkness inside 13 h 45 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 Houston runs from 7 h 26 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 10 h 56 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 Houston are Perseids (0% lit, 81.0/h).

Working against them, Quadrantids (99% lit), Orionids (82% lit), eta-Aquariids (83% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Houston

The closest other cities covered here are San Antonio (305 km W), Ciudad Juárez (1082 km WNW), Santiago de Querétaro (1138 km SSW), León de los Aldama (1151 km SW), Mexico City (1210 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.

1 of the 300 cities lie within 500 km of here, and 7 share its country. The nearest, San Antonio, is 305 km W on a bearing of 264°.

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.