Leonids 2026: Peak Date, Where & How to Watch

By Alexander Merz · Updated on 2 August 2026 · Details checked on 7 October 2026

The Leonids are the fastest major meteor shower of the year: their dust grains hit the atmosphere at 71 kilometres per second – more than twice the speed of December’s Geminids. That is exactly why they leave those bright, bluish-white trails that sometimes keep glowing for seconds afterwards. And every few decades the quiet shower turns into a meteor storm with tens of thousands of meteors per hour. 2026 will not be a storm year – but it will be a very good night.

More in our overview: Shooting Stars.

Leonids 2026: your plan for the night

The calculated maximum falls on 17 November at about 09:52 a.m. EST (15:52 CET, 14:52 UTC) – in broad daylight for both North America and Europe. That sounds annoying, but it splits neatly: from North America the pre-dawn hours of 17 November sit only four to seven hours before the peak, which is as close as you can practically get. From Europe the following night, 17/18 November, is the one to pick – roughly ten hours after the peak, with the radiant highest just before dawn.

The table below is calculated for New York. For Chicago, Denver or Toronto the clock times shift by no more than half an hour in local time – the order of events stays the same.

The short version: set an alarm for 2 a.m. Before that the radiant is simply too low for the long trails to show. Between 2 a.m. and dawn everything lines up at once – dark sky, no Moon, radiant high – and with meteor showers that rarely happens.

Leonids at a glance: the key numbers

Times computed for New York (40.71° N, 74.01° W) from the JPL DE440 ephemeris. Rates after IMO/AMS. Status: August 2026.

What exactly are the Leonids?

The Leonids are a meteor shower: a trail of dust that a comet left along its orbit and that Earth crosses at the same time every year. The parent body is 55P/Tempel-Tuttle. Ernst Wilhelm Tempel and Horace Tuttle discovered it independently in the winter of 1865/66 – in the very decade when the Leonids last truly stormed.

Tempel-Tuttle needs 33.2 years for one orbit. At every perihelion its surface thaws and releases fresh material. Those young, still dense dust ribbons are the reason for the legendary Leonid storms: if Earth meets a ribbon only a few decades old, rates go up by a factor of a thousand. In every other year we merely pass through the thinly spread old stock – and see those famous 15 meteors an hour.

The individual particles are tiny. Most weigh less than a gram, many are smaller than a grain of sand. What you see is not the grain itself but the glowing channel of air it drags behind it some 100 kilometres up. None of it reaches the ground – a Leonid practically never produces a meteorite.

Why the Leonids are the fastest shooting stars

55P/Tempel-Tuttle orbits the Sun retrograde, against the direction of travel of all the planets. Earth and meteoroids therefore run head-on into each other and their speeds add up instead of cancelling out. The result is an entry speed of 71 km/s – around 159,000 miles per hour.

That has three visible consequences. First, Leonids are very bright for their size: the energy released grows with the square of the speed, so a crumb of a tenth of a gram is already enough for a striking trail. Second, they look bluish-white rather than yellowish – the hotter trail excites different emission lines than a slow shower does. Third, they leave persistent trains unusually often: glowing channels of ionised gas that keep shining for seconds or even minutes while high-altitude winds twist them out of shape. Anyone who has seen one does not forget it.

Finding the radiant in Leo

All Leonids appear to come from a single point in the constellation Leo. This radiant sits at right ascension 10h 08m and declination +21.8° – a good ten degrees north of the bright star Regulus, in the middle of the distinctive “Sickle” that forms the lion’s head. The Sickle looks like a backwards question mark.

One important thing: do not stare at the radiant. That is where meteors look shortest, because they are flying straight at you. The longest, most impressive trails appear 40 to 60 degrees away from it. So simply pick the darkest direction in your sky, lie flat and take in as much of it as you can. Leo itself only serves as an orientation aid: when it stands high, rates are high.

When you catch a trail, extend it backwards in your mind. If the extension ends in Leo, it was a Leonid. If it ends in Taurus, you caught a Taurid – in November both showers are running at the same time.

The great Leonid storms: 1833, 1866, 1966, 1999

No other meteor shower has a history like this. On the night of 13 November 1833 so many meteors fell over North America that people feared the end of the world; eyewitnesses spoke of snow made of fire. The astronomer Denison Olmsted worked through the reports and found that all the trails came from one fixed point in the sky – a point that moved with the stars, not with the Earth. That proved shooting stars come from space and are not a weather phenomenon. Meteor astronomy was born.

The rates in this table are estimates from eyewitness accounts and modern counts; they give the order of magnitude, not a measurement to the digit. What all the storm years have in common is that they fell one to three years after a perihelion of Tempel-Tuttle – exactly when the fresh dust ribbons are still compact.

When is the next Leonid storm due?

Tempel-Tuttle was last near the Sun in February 1998, which produced the storm series from 1999 to 2002. Its next perihelion is due in 2031. Dust-trail models expect noticeably elevated rates again in the years after that, roughly 2033 to 2037, on the order of a few hundred meteors per hour. A genuine storm with more than a thousand meteors an hour, however, is not likely again until late this century as far as we can tell today, because Jupiter pushes the decisive dust ribbons out of Earth’s path in the meantime.

Put differently: anyone who was there in 1999 was lucky. Anyone who wants to be there in 2033 can already mark the date – and until then take the peak night every November. All dates through 2027 are in the meteor shower calendar.

The other meteor showers in November

The Leonids are not alone. November has more showers running in parallel than any other month – most of them weak, but one of them delivers the brightest fireballs of the whole year.

The Taurids deserve a note of their own. A ZHR of five sounds laughable, but their meteors are extremely slow (27 km/s) and come from comparatively large chunks. November is therefore the fireball month: if at some point between early and mid November you see a single, unbelievably bright ball of light drifting slowly across half the sky, that was almost certainly a Taurid. The nights around the new moon on 9 November are ideal for it.

The Andromedids are a historical curiosity. Their parent comet 3D/Biela broke into two pieces in 1846 in front of the astronomers watching it, then vanished. In 1872 and 1885 its debris still produced storms of several thousand meteors an hour – today almost nothing of the shower is left. You are watching a meteor shower go extinct.

What you actually need for a Leonid night

The honest answer first: no telescope and no binoculars. Both show you a tiny patch of sky – exactly the opposite of what you want for meteors. Shooting stars are watched with the naked eye, lying down, so that you can take in half the sky without wrecking your neck. The most important “accessories” are therefore a sleeping mat, a sleeping bag and hot tea. In November nights often sit only a few degrees above freezing, and you will not move for three hours.

Two things do help, though. First, about 20 minutes of dark adaptation before you start counting – every glance at your phone resets it. Second, a genuinely dark site; almost everyone underestimates what light pollution costs you. Between a suburban edge and a properly dark field there is easily a factor of three in the number of meteors you see.

What is worth having is a planisphere, a rotating star chart: you dial in 18 November, 3 a.m., and see immediately where Leo stands – no battery, no display to destroy your dark adaptation.

The classic for a meteor night: Oculum Swivelling Sky Map 29 cm

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And if you want to hold a piece of shooting star in your hand: nothing from the Leonids themselves ever reaches the ground, their particles are far too small and too fast. But there are real iron meteorites from Argentina that came through the atmosphere in one piece – and as a present for a star-struck child, a 4.5-billion-year-old lump of space is hard to beat.

A real piece of space in your hand: Campo del Cielo Iron Meteorite in Gift Pouch

A genuine iron meteorite fragment from Argentina, about 4.5 billion years old — the cheapest way to hold outer space in your hand.

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* Affiliate link: if you buy through this link we may earn a small commission from Astroshop or High Point Scientific, at no extra cost to you.

Frequently asked questions about the Leonids

When can I watch the Leonids in 2026?

From North America on the morning of 17 November 2026, from Europe in the night of 17/18 November, in both cases best between 2 a.m. and dawn. Earlier in the night the radiant is still too low. The Leonids are active from 6 November through 30 November, though, so the nights around the peak are worth a look as well.

How many meteors will I actually see?

The ZHR – the theoretical rate under a perfect sky with the radiant overhead – is about 15 per hour in 2026. In practice, under a good rural sky, you will see more like 8 to 12 per hour, and only two to four at the edge of a city. That sounds modest, but the Leonids make up for it in quality: their meteors are brighter and more spectacular than those of most other showers.

Why are they called Leonids?

Meteor showers are named after the constellation their radiant lies in. The Leonid radiant is in Leo – hence Leonids. By the same rule the Perseids are named after Perseus and the Geminids after Gemini.

Are the Leonids dangerous?

To you on the ground, not in the slightest – the particles vaporise completely 100 kilometres above your head. For satellites, however, a Leonid storm is a real risk: at 71 km/s a grain a tenth of a millimetre across is enough to punch through a solar panel. During the storms from 1998 to 2002 several satellites were rotated as a precaution and launches were postponed.

Do I need a telescope for the Leonids?

No – and a telescope would actually get in the way. It shows less than one degree of sky, while a meteor crosses ten degrees and more. Shooting stars are the one astronomical phenomenon where the naked eye beats every instrument. A telescope earns its keep on planets, lunar craters and deep sky – not here.

Can I photograph the Leonids?

Yes, and it is easier than most people expect: a camera with manual exposure on a tripod, a wide-angle lens at roughly f/2.8, ISO 1600 to 3200 and a continuous series of 15 to 20 second frames. Aim 40 or 50 degrees away from the radiant, not at it. Expect a lot of empty frames – over three hours of shooting only a handful will contain a trail. That is normal, even for experienced astrophotographers.

Read next

• Meteor shower calendar 2026/2027 – every peak with a moon rating
• Shooting stars explained – radiants, ZHR and parent bodies
• The Geminids in December – the richest shower of the year, only four weeks later
• The Orionids in October – also very fast, parent body Halley’s Comet
• Astronomical events of the year – eclipses, oppositions and conjunctions
• The constellations – where Leo stands and what else to look for there