Almanac · Meteor showers
Leonids 2026
The Leonids peak on Tue 17 Nov 2026 at 23:42 UTC, when the Earth crosses the thick of the dust from Comet Tempel-Tuttle. The Moon will be first quarter, 55% lit.
- Peak Solar longitude 235.27°
- Moon at peak 55% lit First Quarter
- Radiant 10h 08m, +21° 36′ Never rises south of 68.4°S
- Best rate ZHR 15 About 8.9 an hour at best, from 30°N
Latitude by latitude, the night of 17–18 Nov
The best hour of the night nearest the peak at each latitude: when the radiant gives the most meteors while the sky is dark, how high it stands then, and how many an hour you would count from a suburban sky (Bortle 5) with that hour’s Moon; a dark site shows more. Times are local solar time; north of 68.4°N the radiant never sets.
| Latitude | Best hour | Radiant | Moon | Meteors an hour |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 60°N | 05:27 | 50° up | Down | About 7.3 an hour |
| 45°N | 05:11 | 63° up | Down | About 8.4 an hour |
| 30°N | 04:55 | 69° up | Down | About 8.9 an hour |
| 15°N | 04:41 | 66° up | Down | About 8.7 an hour |
| 0° | 04:21 | 54° up | Down | About 7.7 an hour |
| 15°S | 03:57 | 39° up | Down | About 6 an hour |
| 30°S | 03:16 | 22° up | Down | About 3.6 an hour |
| 45°S | 02:01 | 1° up | Down | Hardly any: about 0.2 an hour at best |
Meteor shower The shower
- Zenithal hourly rate at the peak: 15. That is the count for one observer under a perfect sky with the radiant overhead; the table above is what the sky actually gives.
- Parent body: Comet Tempel-Tuttle.
- Meteors meet the air at 71 km/s.
- Population index 2.5: each magnitude fainter holds that many times more meteors, which is what moonlight and city light take away.
How we worked it out: the peak is the instant the Sun reaches solar longitude 235.27° (J2000), the shower’s maximum in the International Meteor Organization’s Meteor Shower Calendar, found from Meeus’s solar theory; maxima are broad and wander by hours from year to year. The Moon is Meeus’s lunar theory, the one the map draws, checked against the U.S. Naval Observatory. Each latitude is worked at Greenwich’s longitude for the night nearest the peak, sampled every 10 minutes, and the rate is the IMO’s ZHR turned back into what one observer counts: ZHR × sin(radiant altitude) × r(limiting magnitude − 6.5), with the limiting magnitude the map’s own for that sky and Moon.
- International Meteor Organization, Meteor Shower Calendar (J. Rendtel): each maximum’s solar longitude, ZHR, population index and radiant
- J. Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms, ch. 25 (the Sun) and ch. 47–48 (the Moon), as the map draws them
- U.S. Naval Observatory, Astronomical Applications: the Moon’s illuminated fraction, which the tests hold these to