The most reliable and prolific shower of the year — bright, colourful, and rich.
Peak rate
~150 meteors/hr at peak
Active
4 Dec – 20 Dec
Radiant
Gemini
Speed
35 km/s
Parent body
Asteroid 3200 Phaethon
Moon at peak
Peak-night moon only 24% lit — dark skies favour the shower
The Geminids are widely considered the finest shower of the year. At maximum they deliver up to 150 meteors an hour — many of them bright, slow, and tinged yellow — and unlike most showers they perform well in the early evening as well as after midnight.
Their parent is the strangest in the catalogue: not a comet but the rocky near-Earth asteroid 3200 Phaethon, which sheds debris as it skims closer to the Sun than any other named asteroid.