Geminids 2026: the best night to watch, and when the Moon sets in 13 cities

The Geminids peak on Monday 14 December 2026 at about 14:00 UT, which is 7:30 PM in India, 2 PM in London, 9 AM in New York and 11 PM in Tokyo. The Moon is a crescent, a fifth to a quarter lit, that sets between about 8 and 10:30 PM in most places, so the best night is 13 to 14 December in the Americas and Europe, and 14 to 15 December in East Asia and Australia. In India, the best bet is Monday night, 14 December, from moonset (10:19 PM in Bengaluru); the backup is the night before, Sunday into Monday, from 2:30 AM until dawn.

According to the American Meteor Society (AMS), the Geminids are usually the strongest shower of the year, and this year the Moon gets out of the way early. The rise, set and dark times below are my own sums, done on 20 October 2026 with the code that draws my Mac app's sky, and can shift by a minute or two.

When do the Geminids peak in 2026?

The International Meteor Organization (IMO) puts the maximum at 14:00 UT on 14 December in its 2026 calendar, with a zenithal hourly rate, or ZHR, of 150 (a best-case count; what you'll really see is further down). The shower runs from 4 to 20 December, and the IMO calls it "the best and most reliable of the major annual showers". Geminids are famous for bright meteors and fireballs.

Geminid peaks are broad. In a typical year, the IMO says, the ZHR stays at 100 or more for roughly 10 to 12 hours, and every well-observed peak of the past two decades, moved onto this year's calendar, fell between 21:00 UT on 13 December and 18:00 UT on the 14th. I'll call that stretch the peak range. The 14:00 UT time is a prediction, and the real peak can land hours either side of it.

In New York the peak range runs from 4 PM on the 13th to 1 PM on the 14th, so the whole night of 13 to 14 December sits inside it; the predicted peak itself comes at 9 AM, after sunrise, which leaves New York the build-up. In London and the rest of the UK it opens at 9 PM on the 13th, the same night. In Tokyo and Sydney it covers the night of 14 to 15 instead (until 3 AM in Tokyo), and in India it runs from 2:30 AM to 11:30 PM on Monday the 14th.

Geminids 2026 Moon phase, and when the Moon sets

New Moon falls on 9 December (the evening of the 8th in the Americas), so peak week has a young crescent low in the west after sunset. Orbit's engine has it setting between 8:03 and 9:42 PM on 13 December in every northern city in the two tables below, and between 9:03 and 10:32 PM on the 14th. Sydney is the exception, at 11:10 and 11:39 PM. After moonset the sky stays Moon-free until dawn.

How much of it is lit depends on who you ask, and when. The AMS says 15% for the peak night, and timeanddate.com gives New York 19.4% on the 13th and 27.7% on the 14th. Nobody is wrong. A young Moon gains about 8 percentage points of light a day and each source measures at a different hour, so call it a fifth lit on the 13th and a quarter on the 14th.

Best time to watch the Geminids in 2026, city by city

Geminids seem to fly out of one spot in the sky, the radiant, which sits beside the star Castor in Gemini. When I say "Gemini" below, I mean that spot. The table gives each city's moonsets, when Gemini climbs past 20 degrees (two fists at arm's length; lower than that and you lose most of the shower), and the dark hours I'd pick on the region's better night.

Gemini stands highest around 2 AM wherever you are (just before 3 AM in Sydney): 70 to 89 degrees up in the northern cities, and only 23 in Sydney.

If the 13th is cloudy, the 14th still works: the dark hours run 9:45 PM to 5:35 AM in New York and 9:15 PM to 5:55 AM in London.

Of the cities in this guide, Tokyo does best. The predicted peak lands there at 11 PM on the 14th, with Gemini 57 degrees up and the Moon gone since 9:03 PM. Seoul gets the same 11 PM, with Gemini at 47 degrees.

Against timeanddate, these moonsets agree to within a minute in New York, London, Bengaluru and Sydney: Bengaluru's are 9:30 and 10:18 PM on their December page, 9:31 and 10:19 PM here.

If you're out before dawn on the 14th, take a minute off from the meteors. At 5 AM Mars and Jupiter stand 50 degrees up in the south from London, higher from New York and nearly overhead from Bengaluru, with Venus low in the east-south-east. I've written about Mars and Jupiter in November and the bright star in the east before sunrise, which is Venus.

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A closer look

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Night sky facing south with thin constellation lines. Labels mark Mars and Jupiter either side of Regulus near the top, Spica and Venus low on the left, and Procyon and Sirius on the right, above dark hills marked SE, S and SW.

Geminid meteor shower 2026 in India: what time to look

In India the peak lands at 7:30 PM IST on Monday 14 December, and at that minute Gemini hasn't even risen in Bengaluru or Mumbai. It comes up in the north-east at 7:45 PM in Bengaluru. Then you wait for it to clear 20 degrees and for the Moon to set.

My advice is Monday night, the 14th, the closest you can get to the predicted peak with Gemini up. In Bengaluru, start when the Moon sets at 10:19 PM, with Gemini 32 degrees up; it reaches 47 degrees by 11:30 PM, when the peak range closes. The IMO also notes that in most years the bright Geminids bunch up towards the end of the peak, which for India means Monday evening.

Sunday night into Monday is the backup. The peak range opens at 2:30 AM IST, when Gemini stands 70 degrees up in Bengaluru, and dawn twilight starts at 5:18 AM (about 5:45 AM in Mumbai and Delhi). If 2:30 AM is too much, the sky is dark and Moon-free from 9:31 PM on Sunday, a few hours before the peak range opens.

From Bengaluru, Gemini climbs in the east-north-east through the evening. Its patch of sky lies north of Bengaluru's latitude, so it crosses high in the north at 2:19 AM rather than straight overhead.

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A closer look

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Night sky facing east with thin constellation lines. Labels name Capella, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Pollux, Procyon, Sirius and Adhara above dark hills marked NE, E and SE.

A note for my own city: Orbit draws every sky as if you were standing in a dark field, and Bengaluru is not a dark field. City light hides most of the faint stars, and the faint meteors with them, so get out of town if you can.

Where to see the Geminids: which direction to look

Up, mostly. Geminids can appear anywhere in the sky, but trace any trail backwards and it points to the radiant, about 2 degrees from Castor, or three or four full Moons side by side. Castor is the fainter of Gemini's two bright stars; Pollux, the brighter and more orange one, sits beside it.

From the northern cities Gemini comes up in the north-east and climbs through the east-north-east in the evening. In New York it's 22 degrees up at 8 PM and 43 degrees at 10 PM. Around 2 AM it stands south of overhead from the US, Europe and Japan (nearly overhead in the US and Japan) and north of overhead from India. In the southern hemisphere it rises late, about 10:30 PM in Sydney.

NASA's Geminids page suggests lying on your back with your feet towards the south. That advice is written for the US; wherever you are, face the darkest part of your sky.

How many Geminids per hour will you see?

The ZHR of 150 is a calculated number: what an ideal observer would count in an hour under a perfectly clear sky, with stars visible down to magnitude 6.5, the faintest a sharp eye sees in a properly dark place, and the radiant straight overhead. That observer mostly lives in spreadsheets. NASA expects 40 to 50 an hour under dark skies, and up to 120 at the peak in perfect conditions.

Two things pull your count down. One is Gemini's height: the lower it sits, the fewer meteors cross your patch of sky. With it 30 degrees up you see about half of the overhead rate, and at 20 degrees about a third (it's the standard correction meteor counters use). Sydney, where it peaks at 23 degrees, gets a thin show.

Then there's your sky. Astronomers measure brightness in steps called magnitudes, and bigger numbers are fainter. The IMO reckons each magnitude fainter brings about 2.6 times as many Geminids, so every step of faint stars your streetlights take away divides your count by 2.6. By my arithmetic, a suburban sky showing stars to magnitude 5, with Gemini 60 degrees up, turns 150 into about 30 an hour, and a city sky showing stars to magnitude 4, into about 12.

What you do see will look slower than most showers' meteors. Geminids hit the air at 35 km/s, a little under the 40 km/s the IMO calls medium. A Leonid, a month earlier, hits at 71 km/s, twice as fast. The August Perseids sit in between, at 59 km/s. NASA says Geminids tend to look yellow.

Where do the Geminids come from?

They're named after Gemini because that's where they seem to start. The grit itself comes from 3200 Phaethon, a rock 5 to 6 km across that's catalogued as an asteroid, though NASA says it may be a dead comet. The Infrared Astronomical Satellite spotted it in October 1983. It goes round the Sun every 524 days (JPL) and dives to about 21 million km from it, more than twice as close as Mercury ever gets (46 million km).

How to see the Geminid meteor shower

In Europe, North America, Japan or Korea, dress for a December night spent lying still.

See where Gemini is from your Mac

I make Orbit for Mac. It draws the real sky over your city behind your desktop icons and redraws it once a minute. On the night, set Facing to East and turn on Labels on the Sky, and you get your own city's version of the Bengaluru picture above: Gemini a little higher each time you look up, Pollux named and Castor beside it. It doesn't draw meteors, so you'll still have to go outside.

Orbit is $6.99 once (₹699 in India), no subscription, for macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon and Intel, on the Mac App Store. The city menu has 13 places, Bengaluru and New York among them, and Use My Location covers the rest.

Up in the menu bar, Orbit's Moon shows tonight's phase. I've written about what it's like to keep on your desktop in living with a real sky wallpaper.