Meteor showers from Philadelphia in 2026

Meteor showers over Philadelphia in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — 40.0°N, 75.16°W, 12 m, America/New_York — 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 13.6 an hour.

Clock time here runs 1 minute ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 23:55 rather than 00:00. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is the 257th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 1.57 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 08:41 on 14 December 2026 Philadelphia time. Its radiant culminates 82.3° up at 02:03 bearing S, the Moon is 22% 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 11.8 an hour on 12 August (radiant 65.0° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 5.6 on 3 January (radiant 62.7°, Moon 99%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Philadelphia 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 34.0° 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 Philadelphia horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the mid-latitudes at 40.0°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Southern delta-Aquariids, at 34.0°.

Perseids (71.9° at culmination), October Draconids (74.1° at culmination), Ursids (54.5° at culmination) never set from 40.0°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 Philadelphia at 16:35, astronomical darkness runs 18:13 to 05:37, and sunrise is 07:14 — 11 h 24 min of real darkness inside 14 h 39 min of night. These are America/New_York times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Philadelphia runs from 6 h 4 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 11 h 25 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 Philadelphia are Perseids (0% lit, 11.8/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 Philadelphia

The closest other cities covered here are New York City (130 km NE), Toronto (545 km NW), Montréal (631 km N), Chicago (1069 km WNW), Havana (1990 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, New York City, is 130 km NE on a bearing of 49°.

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.