Meteor showers from Johannesburg in 2026

Meteor showers over Johannesburg in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Johannesburg, Gauteng — 26.2°S, 28.04°E, 1767 m, Africa/Johannesburg — 10 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 78.5 an hour.

Clock time here runs 8 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:02 rather than 00:00. Johannesburg, Gauteng is the 25th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 9.42 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 15:41 on 14 December 2026 Johannesburg time. Its radiant culminates 31.6° up at 02:11 bearing N, the Moon is 28% lit, and 00:00–04:00 is the window — about 78.5 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Orionids manages 14.8 an hour on 21 October (radiant 47.6° at best, Moon 80% lit) and the April Lyrids 9.1 on 22 April (radiant 30.4°, Moon 37%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Johannesburg 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 -11.8° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Northern Taurids at 3.2 an hour on 12 November.

What this latitude allows

Latitude decides what is available at all. From 26.2°S, Ursids never lift a radiant above the Johannesburg horizon at maximum — the best any of them manages over the whole 24 hours is -11.8°, still under the horizon. Their radiants sit too far into the northern sky, and only travelling fixes that.

Nothing is circumpolar from 26.2°S among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Johannesburg rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Johannesburg at 18:55, astronomical darkness runs 20:26 to 03:39, and sunrise is 05:10 — 7 h 13 min of real darkness inside 10 h 15 min of night. These are Africa/Johannesburg times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Johannesburg runs from 7 h 12 min on the Ursids night (23 December) to 10 h 27 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 Johannesburg are Perseids (0% lit, 8.8/h).

Working against them, Orionids (80% lit), eta-Aquariids (85% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Johannesburg

The closest other cities covered here are Pretoria (53 km NNE), Durban (501 km SE), Harare (981 km NNE), Lusaka (1201 km N), Cape Town (1262 km SW). 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 4 share its country. The nearest, Pretoria, is 53 km NNE on a bearing of 16°.

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.