eta-Aquariids from Cape Town in 2026

eta-Aquariids from Cape Town: the short answer

From Cape Town, Western Cape (33.9°S, 25 m) the eta-Aquariids maximum of 11:01 on 6 May 2026 is not worth a broken night. The radiant culminates at 56.5° at 08:25, and against Cape Town's own measured sky that converts to 1.5 meteors an hour at best.

That ranks it 4th of twelve from Cape Town this year, behind the Geminids (9.0/h) and the Orionids (2.0/h).

The radiant track over this city

Aquarius carries the radiant. From Cape Town it clears the horizon at 02:24 on a bearing of 91° (E), reaches 56.5° at 08:25 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 14:27. Within the observing window it peaks at 42.2°.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Cape Town is 18:01, civil twilight ends 18:27, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 19:26. It holds until 05:59, with sunrise at 07:24: 10 h 33 min of real darkness inside 13 h 23 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:42 here rather than at 00:00: Africa/Johannesburg runs 46 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 18.42°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 Cape Town. The Moon is 85% lit and only 2 of 12 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 20:26. Moonset 11:43. At the best hour it stands 65.3° above the horizon, 67° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 2.96.

Why 2 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 42.2° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 2.96, Cape Town converts that ZHR into about 1.5 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 19:00 (radiant -50.0°) to 1.5 at 06:00 (radiant 42.2°), peaking at 1.5. That spread across 12 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 Cape Town rather than the only one.

Watching from around Cape Town

Cape Town, Western Cape is the 60th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 4.77 million at 25 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Johannesburg (1262 km NE), Durban (1272 km ENE), Pretoria (1308 km NE) — 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.