The Leonids peak just before dawn on 18 November, and India has a dark sky for it

The Leonid meteor shower reaches its predicted peak at 5:15 am Indian Standard Time on Wednesday, 18 November 2026, according to the International Meteor Organization (IMO). For India, that timing is unusually kind. The half Moon sets around midnight, the shower’s radiant in the constellation Leo climbs high into the south-eastern sky, and darkness holds until dawn. From Delhi the best window runs from moonset at about 12:10 am to the start of dawn at about 5:25 am.

Set your expectations before you set your alarm. The IMO gives the Leonids a typical rate of about 15 meteors an hour under a perfect sky, far fewer than the Geminids in December. What the Leonids have is speed. They strike the atmosphere at 71 km per second, the fastest of the major showers, and the bright ones are striking. Below we work out what that rate means from a city, a suburb and a dark village.

When is the Leonid meteor shower in India in 2026?

The Leonids are active from 6 to 30 November. The IMO’s 2026 calendar places the regular maximum at 23:45 UT on 17 November, when Earth reaches solar longitude 235.27°, the point in its orbit where it meets the densest part of the stream. In Indian Standard Time that is 5:15 am on the 18th. An alternative model by the astronomer Mikhail Maslov, also quoted in the calendar, gives an earlier peak at 16:00 UT, or 9:30 pm IST on the 17th. Leo has not risen in India at that hour, so if Maslov is right, Indian observers would catch the shower a few hours after its best. Either way, the hours before dawn on the 18th are the ones to use.

The calendar also lists modelled encounters with individual dust trails, the debris shed by the parent comet on particular past orbits. Both modellers it quotes, Jérémie Vaubaillon and Mikiya Sato, expect these trails to be thin. One, from material released in 1800, is due at 21:55 UT on 18 November, which is 3:25 am IST on the 19th. India is well placed for that one, with the Moon down by about 1 am and the radiant high. It is a reason for an enthusiast to look again on the 19th, not a promise of an outburst.

What time should I watch the Leonids in my city?

Two things open the window: the Moon has to set and the radiant has to rise. On the night of 17 November they happen at almost the same time across India, around midnight. Meteor rates climb as the radiant gains height, so the hours after 2 am are better than the hour after moonset. The window closes when astronomical twilight begins, the moment the Sun reaches 18 degrees below the horizon.

The table holds a detail that general guides miss. At the predicted peak of 5:15 am, the sky is still fully dark over Delhi, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Pune, Bhopal and Srinagar, because dawn comes later in the west and north-west of the country. Further east, in Kolkata, Guwahati, Patna and the southern cities, astronomical twilight has already begun. That loses less than it sounds, because the first stage of twilight is still too dark for most eyes to notice, but western India is the better placed for the exact moment of the peak.

How many Leonid meteors will I see?

The figure quoted for a shower is its zenithal hourly rate, or ZHR: the number one observer would see in an hour with the radiant directly overhead and a sky dark enough to show stars of magnitude 6.5. Almost nobody watches under those conditions, so the real count is lower. The standard adjustment multiplies the ZHR by the sine of the radiant’s height and divides it by the shower’s population index, r, once for every magnitude your sky falls short of 6.5. For the Leonids the IMO gives a ZHR of about 15 and r of 2.5. With the radiant 65 degrees up, which it is over most of India by 4:30 am, this works out to:

• A dark rural site, where the Milky Way is obvious (limiting magnitude 6.5): about 14 meteors an hour.
• A village or the outer edge of a town (magnitude 5.5): about 5 an hour.
• A suburb (magnitude 4.5): about 2 an hour.
• A city centre, where only a handful of stars show (magnitude 3.5): about 1 an hour, often fewer.

So the most useful thing you can do is get away from lights. Light pollution, not the choice of night, decides most of the count, as we explained in our story on how fast the night sky is brightening. These are averages: meteors come in clumps, so a quiet ten minutes is normal.

Why the Leonids are famous

The Leonids are debris from comet 55P/Tempel–Tuttle, which returns to the inner solar system about every 33 years. In the years around its returns the shower has produced storms, the most celebrated meteor displays on record. The storm of November 1833 over North America led to the modern understanding of meteor showers. In 1966, NASA notes, observers in the western United States saw thousands of meteors a minute for a short spell, and the returns of 1999 and 2001 brought rates in the thousands an hour.

The IMO lists the comet’s next perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun, as 20 May 2031. The meteoroids Earth meets this year are ahead of the comet in its orbit, and no model predicts a storm in 2026. A quiet year with a dark sky is still a good year to learn the shower.

How to watch the Leonids from India

• Pick the night of 17 to 18 November and set an alarm for 2 or 3 am. Watch until the sky starts to brighten.
• Find the radiant by finding the planets. Before dawn, Jupiter and Mars stand close together high in the south-east, near Regulus, the brightest star in Leo. The radiant is about a fist’s width, held at arm’s length, from that pair. Our guide to the planets visible from India this winter shows where they are.
• Do not stare at the radiant. Meteors appear anywhere, and those near it have short trails. Lie back and take in a wide stretch of sky about halfway up.
• Give your eyes 20 minutes in the dark and keep your phone off. A single bright screen undoes much of that adaptation.
• Check the forecast. Mid-November brings haze and smog to much of north India, and the stubble-burning season can make it worse. A clear night at a dark site beats a perfect timing under haze.
• To photograph them, use a wide lens on a tripod with exposures of 10 to 20 seconds at a high ISO, and let the camera shoot continuously. Most frames will be empty; that is normal.

If December suits you better, the Geminids are the stronger shower, and our Geminids guide for India has the city-by-city timings.

How we worked this out

The peak times, the radiant position (right ascension 152°, declination +22°), the speed, the rate, the population index and the dust-trail predictions all come from the IMO’s 2026 calendar. Moonset, radiant height and twilight times are our own calculations with the open-source Astronomy Engine library (version 2.1.19), for the centre of each city, rounded to the minute. The hourly counts use the standard ZHR adjustment described above, with the radiant at 65 degrees.

Sources

• International Meteor Organization: Meteor Shower Calendar 2026 (PDF)
• NASA Science: Leonids
• Astronomy Engine, open-source astronomy calculation library