eta-Aquariids from Beijing in 2026

eta-Aquariids from Beijing: the short answer

From Beijing (39.9°N, 49 m) the eta-Aquariids maximum of 17:01 on 6 May 2026 is not worth a broken night. The radiant culminates at 50.0° at 07:52, and against Beijing's own measured sky that converts to 0.8 meteors an hour at best.

That ranks it 7th of twelve from Beijing this year, behind the Geminids (13.6/h) and the Perseids (11.6/h).

The radiant track over this city

At 39.9°N a declination-−0.5° radiant traces an arc from 01:53 to 13:52, topping out at 50.0° at 07:52 bearing 180°. Inside the dark window it only manages 23.7°, and that lower figure is the one the rates are built from. The radiant currently lies in Aquarius.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Beijing is 19:13, civil twilight ends 19:43, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 20:59. It holds until 03:22, with sunrise at 05:08: 6 h 23 min of real darkness inside 9 h 55 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:10 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 14 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 116.40°E. That offset is why the best hour on this page is not the hour you would guess from the clock.

What the Moon does here

Moonlight is the limiting factor on this night from Beijing. The Moon is 79% lit and only 4 of 9 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 23:44. Moonset 08:40. At the best hour it stands 20.4° above the horizon, 60° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 3.46.

Why 1 an hour and not 50

Zenithal hourly rate 50, population index 2.4, entry speed 66.3 km/s — very fast. Those are stream constants. What changes from city to city is the geometry: at 23.7° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 3.46, Beijing converts that ZHR into about 0.8 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 20:00 (radiant -50.4°) to 0.3 at 04:00 (radiant 23.7°), peaking at 0.8. That spread across 9 hours is why a "what time" answer beats a "how many" answer.

The stream comes from Comet 1P/Halley and is listed as active 19 April to 27 May, so 6 May 2026 is the best night from Beijing rather than the only one.

Watching from around Beijing

Beijing is the 2nd largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 18.96 million at 49 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Tianjin (108 km SE), Baoding (140 km SW), Tangshan (155 km E) — close enough that the radiant altitudes barely change, far enough that sunset and moonrise do.

What this page does not know

Rates on this page are computed against this city's own measured sky brightness, derived from satellite night-lights data. That is a calculated brightness for the point directly overhead, not a survey of your street: a park on the edge of town and a lit car park in the centre share the same figure here and will not look the same. It is also zenith-only, while the Bortle scale describes the whole sky from horizon to horizon.

Cloud cover is a forecast, not a constant, so it is resolved when you load the tonight card and is deliberately absent from this prerendered page — the hourly table shows "unavailable" rather than assuming clear skies. Meteor outbursts, local terrain and building horizons are not modelled.

A single observer with an unobstructed horizon typically records 30–50% below the ideal-sky figure. Give your eyes twenty minutes to adapt, keep bright screens away, look about halfway up the sky rather than straight at the radiant, and count for a full hour before judging a shower.