eta-Aquariids from Chongqing in 2026

eta-Aquariids from Chongqing: the short answer

The eta-Aquariids reaches maximum at 17:01 local time on 6 May 2026 over Chongqing (29.6°N, 106.56°E, 289 m). The radiant culminates 60.3° high at 08:32 and the useful window runs 04:00–05:00, with an ideal-sky ceiling of 7.9 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 7th of twelve from Chongqing this year, behind the Geminids (149.8/h) and the Perseids (77.1/h).

The radiant track over this city

At 29.6°N a declination-−0.5° radiant traces an arc from 02:32 to 14:31, topping out at 60.3° at 08:32 bearing 180°. Inside the dark window it only manages 31.4°, 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 Chongqing is 19:33, civil twilight ends 19:58, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 21:01. It holds until 04:39, with sunrise at 06:07: 7 h 38 min of real darkness inside 10 h 34 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:50 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 54 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 106.56°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 Chongqing. The Moon is 79% lit and only 4 of 10 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 23:50. Moonset 09:56. At the best hour it stands 31.5° above the horizon, 60° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 5.69.

Why 8 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 31.4° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 5.69, Chongqing converts that ZHR into about 7.9 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 20:00 (radiant -59.7°) to 2.5 at 05:00 (radiant 31.4°), peaking at 7.9. That spread across 10 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 Chongqing rather than the only one.

Watching from around Chongqing

Chongqing is the 36th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 7.46 million at 289 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Nanchong (145 km NNW), Dazhou (203 km NNE), Zunyi (211 km S) — 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.