Meteor showers from Lusaka in 2026

Meteor showers over Lusaka in 2026

Latitude 15.4°S, longitude 28.29°E, elevation 1277 m, time zone Africa/Lusaka: those four numbers decide most of what Lusaka can see. 11 of the twelve annual showers get their radiant up in darkness at maximum here and 4 are worth a late night, led by the Geminids at 101.1 meteors an hour.

Clock time here runs 7 minutes ahead of mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 00:01 rather than 00:00. Lusaka is the 165th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 2.21 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 15:41 on 14 December 2026 Lusaka time. Its radiant culminates 42.4° up at 02:10 bearing N, the Moon is 28% lit, and 23:00–05:00 is the window — about 101.1 meteors an hour on the reference sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 27.2 an hour on 13 August (radiant 16.6° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Orionids 17.0 on 21 October (radiant 58.2°, Moon 80%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Lusaka 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 -1.0° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the Quadrantids at 1.7 an hour on 3 January.

What this latitude allows

Latitude decides what is available at all. From 15.4°S, Ursids never lift a radiant above the Lusaka horizon at maximum — the best any of them manages over the whole 24 hours is -1.0°, still under the horizon. Their radiants sit too far into the northern sky, and only travelling fixes that.

Nothing is circumpolar from 15.4°S among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Lusaka rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Lusaka at 18:32, astronomical darkness runs 19:53 to 04:10, and sunrise is 05:31 — 8 h 17 min of real darkness inside 10 h 59 min of night. These are Africa/Lusaka times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Lusaka runs from 8 h 17 min on the Ursids night (23 December) to 10 h 5 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 Lusaka are Perseids (0% lit, 27.2/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 Lusaka

The closest other cities covered here are Harare (399 km SE), Lubumbashi (426 km NNW), Pretoria (1150 km S), Mbuji-Mayi (1151 km NNW), Johannesburg (1201 km S). 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.

2 of the 300 cities lie within 500 km of here, and Lusaka is the only one covered in its country. The nearest, Harare, is 399 km SE on a bearing of 133°.

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.