Peak: the night of December 13 into the morning of December 14, 2026. Up to 120 meteors an hour under ideal conditions, and this year the Moon stays out of the way. It is the best shower of the year and it needs no equipment at all.
This is the one night where buying gear actively makes your experience worse. A telescope shows you a fraction of a degree of sky; a meteor crosses tens of degrees in under a second. You want the widest possible field of view, which means your own eyes, and you want them fully dark adapted, which means no phone screen for the twenty minutes before you start looking.
Peak is at 5:44 UTC on December 14, which is just before midnight on the 13th on the US east coast and mid-evening further west. Unusually for a meteor shower, the Geminids are worth watching from mid evening onwards rather than only in the pre-dawn hours, because the radiant in Gemini rises early. Rates build through the night and are typically highest around 2am local time, when the radiant is overhead.
Not at Gemini. The meteors radiate outward from that point, which means the ones near the radiant are coming almost straight at you and leave short stubby trails. Look about halfway up the sky, forty or so degrees away from Gemini in any direction, and you catch them side on where the trails are longest. In practice the best instruction is to lie back, take in as much sky as you can, and stop trying to aim.
Something to lie on, because craning your neck upward for an hour is miserable and looking straight up while flat is not. A sleeping bag or a reclining chair, more layers than you think, and something hot to drink. Give yourself a full twenty minutes for your eyes to dark adapt before judging the shower, and then give it at least an hour, because meteors arrive in clumps and a quiet ten minutes tells you nothing.
Almost every meteor shower comes from a comet shedding ice and dust as it nears the Sun. The Geminids come from 3200 Phaethon, which is a rocky asteroid roughly five kilometres across that behaves like a comet only at its closest approach to the Sun, where its surface heats enough to fracture and shed debris. That rocky origin is why Geminid meteors are denser and slower than most, which in turn is why they burn brighter and longer, and why the shower has been getting stronger over the past few decades rather than fading.
Any camera that allows manual settings on a tripod will do. Widest lens you own, aperture as wide as it opens, ISO 1600 to 3200, twenty second exposures on a repeating timer, pointed about forty degrees from the radiant, and then leave it running for hours. Meteor photography is almost entirely a numbers game: most frames will be empty. A smart telescope is the wrong tool here, since its narrow field makes catching a meteor a matter of pure luck.