Meteor shower
Geminids
Good from New Zealand
The year's richest shower, and an oddity: its parent is a rocky asteroid, not a comet. Slow, bright, often yellow.
Computed from standard astronomical algorithms · Shower parameters: IMO working list of visual meteor showers · Reviewed Oct 2026 · Method
From New Zealand
The strongest shower of the year, and worth staying up for from New Zealand even though the +32° radiant does not get especially high. It peaks around midnight local time here, and the meteors are slow and bright — the kind that are easy to see without dark adaptation. Warm December nights help.
How much the Moon will spoil it
A bright Moon washes out everything but the brightest meteors, and it is the difference between a good night and a wasted one more often than cloud is. Computed for the peak:
| Year | Moon at peak | Phase | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 24% lit | Waxing crescent | Dark — good |
| 2027 | 99% lit | Waning gibbous | Badly moonlit |
How to watch
Get away from town lights, give your eyes 20 minutes to adapt, and do not look at your phone. Lie back and take in as much sky as you can rather than staring at the radiant — meteors near the radiant are foreshortened and look shorter than they are.
The quoted 150 per hour is a zenithal hourly rate: what a single observer would count under a perfect dark sky with the radiant directly overhead. Nobody ever sees that. A realistic dark-sky count from New Zealand is a fraction of it, and from a suburb, a fraction of that. Dark sky notes apply here too.