eta-Aquariids from Cairo in 2026

eta-Aquariids from Cairo: the short answer

Maximum for the eta-Aquariids in 2026 is 12:01 Cairo time on 6 May 2026. From 30.1°N the radiant gets to 59.9° at 08:33, the Moon is 78% lit, and the ideal-sky ceiling is 8.0 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 7th of twelve from Cairo this year, behind the Geminids (149.9/h) and the Perseids (77.4/h).

The radiant track over this city

Aquarius carries the radiant. From Cairo it clears the horizon at 02:33 on a bearing of 90° (E), reaches 59.9° at 08:33 in the south, and drops back below the horizon at 14:33. Within the observing window it peaks at 31.1°.

When it gets dark here

Cairo loses the Sun at 19:35 and gets it back at 06:07. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 21:04 to 04:38, 7 h 35 min out of 10 h 32 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:51 here rather than at 00:00: Africa/Cairo runs 55 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 31.25°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 Cairo. The Moon is 78% lit and only 4 of 9 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 00:02. Moonset 10:07. At the best hour it stands 30.7° above the horizon, 57° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 5.72.

Why 8 an hour and not 50

Converting ZHR 50 into something useful for Cairo means multiplying by sin(31.1°) and dividing by 2.4 raised to (6.5 − 5.72). That lands at 8.0 meteors an hour, from very fast 66.3 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 21:00 (radiant -59.5°) to 2.5 at 05:00 (radiant 31.1°), peaking at 8.0. 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 Cairo rather than the only one.

Watching from around Cairo

Cairo is the 23rd largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 9.61 million at 23 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Alexandria (180 km NW), Beirut (585 km NE), Damascus (611 km NE) — close enough that the radiant altitudes barely change, far enough that sunset and moonrise do.

What this page does not know

Light-pollution data for this location is not connected yet. Rates on this page are computed against the reference rural sky the zenithal hourly rate is defined for (naked-eye limiting magnitude 6.5); they are not a claim about how bright the sky is where you are standing. Once the light-pollution layer is connected these figures will be recomputed for the local sky and will generally fall.

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.