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The Perseid and Geminid Meteor Showers Will Be Particularly Good This Year (2026)

The Perseid and Geminid meteor showers are the strongest meteor showers of the year, but viewing conditions aren’t favorable to view or photograph them every year. When the moon is in the sky, the light from the moon often overpowers the dim and brief light from a meteor. So There’s really only a week or so each month with a dark enough sky to make meteor watching most worthwhile. With the moon phases spanning 28 days, that week has a 75% chance of not occurring on the best nights for seeing the most possible meteors. Often you’ll have no moon in the sky for a few hours, but for the greatest convenience and flexibility, it’s best to make meteor showers a priority when the dark sky viewing conditions are particularly good.

In 2026, the peak night for the Perseid meteor shower will be the night of August 12-13. The darkest hours vary a bit with your latitude, but in mid northern latitudes in the United States they’ll be roughly 9:30 pm to 4:30 am. The highest rate of meteors will be from midnight to 4:30am. The new moon is on August 12th, then it doesn’t rise until 7:14 am as a slim 1% crescent. So in a rare coincidence, we’ll have all of the dark night hours with prime viewing conditions, roughly 7 hours! For a dramatic example of moonlit vs. dark sky viewing, see my 2010 time-lapse video of the Geminid meteor shower before and after the 50% full moon set.

Many people wonder where Perseid meteors can be seen in the sky. So logically, they focus their attention on the radiant point, near the constellation Perseus. But meteors are coming almost directlya t you near there, so even the longer, brighter ones don’t leave much of an apparent trail through the sky. A Freight train coming at you can look like just the face of the engine. A freight train going by you gives you a view of all of the cars. So it can be best to point more away from the radiant point, so you can see the full length of the meteor trails from the side.

The entire concept of a “radiant point” is a little misleading, since the bits of comet dust are moving for the most part in parallel, along the path of the original comet that they came off of. So the “radiant point” is a bit of an optical illusion, much like parallel railroad tracks appear to converge toward a vanishing point in the distance.

There are other circumstances we can see parallel lines in nature appearing to converge: crepuscular rays, and anti-crepuscular rays. Sun rays appear to converge in both an origin point and another point on (or just below) the opposite horizon.

Looking at meteors that graze the atmosphere towards the opposite horizon, they appear to converge on an “anti-radiant” point. like the same railroad tracks but looking the opposite direction. The radiant point of the Perseid meteor shower is above the horizon at night here in the Northern Hemisphere, so the anti-radiant point is where the meteors appear to converge, below the horizon.

Interestingly, you can use perspective correction to visualize the meteors flying in parallel trajectories. There they are! The radiant point is near the Milky Way, so of course the parallel track of the dust heads to the anti-radiant point near the Milky Way on the opposite side of the sky. Particularly after midnight when the radiant point is higher in the sky, you might as well shoot toward the Milky Way galactic center to have that additional point of interest in your sky.

Loriand I If you think about the earth rotating around the sun, as your location on earth rotates away from the sun into the shadow of night, you’re behind the front of the earth as it travels through space around thesun. When you reach roughly midnight, you’re just about to rotate into the path of the earth through space as it rotates around the sun. This is why you see more meteors after midnight: You get more bugs on the windshield of your car as it moves, after midnight the sky above you becomes the windshield, hitting more comet dust. This creates an interesting opportunity before and after midnight: any dust that the earth collides with, their trajectory is perpendicular to the sky above you. So you get more long, bright, earth-grazing meteors in the hour or two on either side of midnight. They may be high in the sky, so your camera will need to cover that part of the sky in order to catch them.

Lori and I will be in the High Sierra pursuing the Perseid meteor shower this year. The Perseid peak is on the night 0f August 12/13. Meteor rates fall off fast after the peak, so the second best night is August 11/12. The third best night is likely August 10/11.

The Geminid meteor shower is an even better meteor shower to pursue, with more meteors, and an intensity that is growing. It’s better if you can find a place warm enough place to view it from, in December! That’s why we tend to go to Death Valley National Park. The skies are dark, and temperatures are mild compared to the alternatives. For 2023 the peak is on the night of December 13/14. It gets dark by around 6:15pm, but the moon is in the sky as a 22% crescent, setting at around 9pm. Then the sky is dark and moonless until around 5:30 am! So Even with the crescent moon in the sky at first, there are still 8.5 hours of dark sky viewing and shooting time, more time than on the entire dark new moon night of the Perseids in August! In 2023 we had eight clients with us. Many started shooting shortly after 6pm, and we had cameras running until morning twilight. I stayed out all night with my client and good friend David. Around 5am after achieving our best possible night vision for many hours, we noticed that we were suddenly casting shadows. It was too early to be morning twilight. We turned around, and the planet Venus was rising over Dante’s View! Venus is that bright. And Death Valley is that dark. See my long Geminid meteor shower time-lapse video from that night here on Flickr. Make it go full screen to see the meteors better. One of these days I have to make the meteors slightly more persistent in the video.

We’ll be out with another group of clients for low angle winter light landscapes and the Geminid meteor shower this year! The way we shoot a meteor shower, you can process your results to create a meteor shower composite image, or a time-lapse video. I blogged about that 15 years ago: How to Create A Time-lapse Video of a Meteor Shower. Join us to shoot a meteor shower in 2026 if you can, since neither major meteor shower will have favorable conditions for stargazing or photography next year.