Leonid meteor shower 2026: peak night and how to watch
Leonid meteor shower 2026 peaks November 17 to 18: the time in GMT and your local zone, the Moon, expected rates, why no storm, and how to watch and photograph.
Why it matters
The Leonids are one of the few November sky events anyone can see with no equipment, and knowing the right hours, after moonset and before dawn on November 18, makes the difference between seeing a handful of meteors and none.
The Leonid meteor shower peaks on the night of November 17 to 18, 2026, with the International Meteor Organization (IMO) putting the maximum at 23:45 GMT on November 17. Expect around 10 to 15 meteors an hour at best from a dark site, after midnight local time.
Quick answer: The 2026 Leonids are active from November 6 to 30 and peak on the night of November 17 to 18. A first quarter moon sets around 11 p.m. local time, so the darkest hours, after midnight until dawn on November 18, are the best window wherever you live. This is a quiet year: no meteor storm is forecast.
That modest number surprises people who have heard Leonid stories. This is the shower that once filled North American skies with tens of thousands of meteors an hour, and the one astronomers wait for every 33 years or so. 2026 sits in the quiet part of that cycle. It is still a good night out, with some of the fastest meteors of the year, as long as you know when to look.
When is the Leonid meteor shower peak in 2026?
The IMO’s 2026 meteor shower calendar, compiled by Jürgen Rendtel, lists the Leonids as active from November 6 to 30, with the regular maximum at 23:45 GMT on November 17. EarthSky, citing the American Meteor Society, gives 00:00 GMT on November 18. Those times are 15 minutes apart and describe the same event: Earth passing through the plane of the comet’s orbit.
NASA’s Leonids page lists the peak night as November 16 to 17. The IMO and EarthSky both point to the following night, so November 17 to 18 is the one to plan around. If the sky is clear on both nights, go out on both. Leonid activity builds and fades over several days rather than switching on and off.
The Moon is the main complication. First quarter falls at 11:48 GMT on November 17, according to EarthSky and lunar tables such as Lunaf. A half-lit Moon is bright in the evening but sets around 11 p.m. local time, Star Walk notes, which leaves the hours after midnight dark. That suits the Leonids, because their radiant does not rise until about midnight anyway.
What time to watch where you live
Meteor showers work on local time, not on the GMT maximum. The radiant, the point in the constellation Leo that the meteors appear to come from, rises around midnight and is highest at dawn, so the best hours everywhere are from midnight to the first light of November 18. The table converts the IMO’s peak time and that window for five regions. US clocks went back on November 1, so Eastern Time is five hours behind GMT by then.
| Region | IMO peak, local time | Best window (local) | Window starts (GMT) |
|---|---|---|---|
| UK and Ireland (GMT) | 11:45 p.m., Nov 17 | Midnight to dawn, Nov 18 | 00:00, Nov 18 |
| US East (ET, GMT minus 5) | 6:45 p.m., Nov 17 | Midnight to dawn, Nov 18 | 05:00, Nov 18 |
| India (IST, GMT plus 5:30) | 5:15 a.m., Nov 18 | Midnight to dawn, Nov 18 | 18:30, Nov 17 |
| Pakistan (PKT, GMT plus 5) | 4:45 a.m., Nov 18 | Midnight to dawn, Nov 18 | 19:00, Nov 17 |
| Philippines (PHT, GMT plus 8) | 7:45 a.m., Nov 18 (daylight) | Midnight to dawn, Nov 18 | 16:00, Nov 17 |
Source: IMO 2026 Meteor Shower Calendar; EarthSky; times converted by The Daily Summit.
South Asia comes off best on paper: the IMO maximum lands in the predawn hours in India and Pakistan, with Leo high and the Moon long gone. In the UK the peak arrives just as the radiant clears the horizon. In the Americas and the Philippines the nodal peak falls in early evening or daylight, but the predawn hours a few hours either side still catch the shower near full strength.
How to watch the Leonids
No telescope or binoculars are needed. Both narrow your view, and Leonids can appear anywhere in the sky.
- Check the forecast for clear skies on November 17 and 18, and pick whichever night looks better.
- Get away from lights. A field or beach outside town will show far more meteors than a city backyard.
- Wait for moonset and the radiant to rise. Start around midnight local time; the hours before dawn are usually the richest.
- Lie back and look about halfway up the sky, not straight at Leo. NASA points out that meteors near the radiant look short, while those farther away leave longer streaks.
- Give your eyes 20 to 30 minutes to adapt to the dark, and keep phone screens dim or off.
- Stay at least an hour. Meteors arrive in clumps and lulls, and a 15-minute look can easily land in a lull.
Dress warmly: the predawn hours are the coldest of a November night. Observers south of the equator can see Leonids too, but Leo climbs less high there and counts are usually lower; Star Walk lists the shower as best from the Northern Hemisphere.
Why Leonids look different
Leonids hit the atmosphere at about 71 kilometers (44 miles) a second, according to the IMO and NASA. That is roughly 159,000 miles an hour, among the fastest of any annual shower, because Earth meets the stream almost head-on. The result is quick, bright streaks, often with a glowing trail that lingers for a second or two after the meteor has gone.
NASA notes that the larger particles produce fireballs, brighter than magnitude minus 3 on the astronomers’ brightness scale, and that meteors seen low on the horizon, called earthgrazers, can leave long, colorful tails.
Comet Tempel-Tuttle and the great storms
The dust comes from comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, found independently by Ernst Tempel and Horace Tuttle in 1865 and 1866. NASA puts its nucleus at about 3.6 kilometers (2.24 miles) across. It circles the Sun roughly every 33 years, and each pass near the Sun sheds a fresh trail of debris along its orbit.
When Earth runs into one of those young, dense trails, the shower turns into a storm. NASA defines a meteor storm as at least 1,000 meteors an hour.
- 12 to 13 Nov 1833: A storm over eastern North America produced, by one widely cited estimate, more than 100,000 meteors an hour. Yale’s Denison Olmsted noticed the meteors all radiated from a point in Leo, the first clear description of a shower radiant.
- 1866 to 1868: Weaker storms returned on schedule, and observations from those years tied the shower to comet Tempel-Tuttle.
- 1899: The expected storm never came, which led many astronomers to assume the stream had shifted away for good.
- 17 Nov 1966: Observers in western North America reported 40 or more meteors a second for about 15 minutes. The IMO says the meteoroids had left the comet in 1899, 66 years earlier.
- 1999 to 2002: A run of storms with rates of up to about 3,000 an hour; in 2001 thousands an hour fell over North America and Hawaii. NASA counts 2002 as the most recent Leonid storm.
The 1999 to 2002 storms were also a turning point in forecasting. David Asher and Robert McNaught modelled the debris as separate trails, one from each past passage of the comet, and their predictions timed bursts of activity to within about ten minutes. That trail-by-trail method is what forecasters still use.
Why 2026 will not be a storm year
The comet is not due back at perihelion, its closest point to the Sun, until May 20, 2031, the IMO says, and the meteoroids Earth meets in 2026 are ahead of it in its orbit. The densest young trails stay close to the comet, so storms cluster in the years around its return, not in the middle of the cycle.
That is why the IMO lists an expected zenithal hourly rate (ZHR) of about 15. The calendar does include several close approaches to old dust trails between November 17 and 19, using models by Jérémie Vaubaillon and Mikiya Sato. Vaubaillon’s note says a trail ejected in 1800 reaches Earth but holds too few meteoroids for a significant outburst. Sato rates the trails as low density but suggests the low speed at which their dust left the comet may mean a modest rise in activity.
One more time is worth knowing. Maslov’s 2007 model, cited in the IMO calendar, puts a peak at 16:00 GMT on November 17, also with a ZHR of about 15. That is midnight on November 18 in the Philippines and 9:30 p.m. on November 17 in India, so observers in Asia have a second reason to watch from the moment Leo rises.
What the hourly rate really means
ZHR is the number of meteors one observer would see in an hour under a perfectly dark sky with the radiant directly overhead. Real conditions are almost never that good, so actual counts run lower. This is why figures for the same shower vary so much: the IMO’s ZHR is about 15, EarthSky says 10 to 15, and NASA’s page says fewer than 3 an hour is common. With moonlight, haze or a suburban sky, a count of five to ten in an hour is a normal Leonid night, not a failed one.
Photographing the Leonids
A phone on night mode can catch a bright Leonid, but a camera with manual settings does far better. NASA’s tips for meteor photography boil down to a few rules. Use a sturdy tripod and a wide-angle lens, since a meteor could cross any part of the sky. Focus manually on a bright star, because autofocus struggles in the dark. Trigger the shutter with the self-timer, a cable release or an app so the camera does not shake.
For exposure length NASA suggests the “500 rule”: divide 500 by the lens’s focal length in millimeters to get the longest exposure, in seconds, before stars start to trail. A 20 mm lens gives 25 seconds. Then shoot continuously. Most frames will show only stars, and that is how meteor photography works: dozens of empty frames for every streak.
Aim the camera about 45 degrees away from Leo rather than straight at it, where the meteors are longer and photograph better.
Watch for: The next real chance of Leonid outbursts comes in 2033 and 2034, near the comet’s 2031 return. The IMO says no storm is expected before then, and models summarized by Star Walk and others point to rates of up to about 400 an hour on November 17, 2033, short of a full storm but far beyond 2026.
