eta-Aquariids from Harbin in 2026

eta-Aquariids from Harbin: the short answer

The eta-Aquariids peaks at 17:01 local time on 6 May 2026 over Harbin, Heilongjiang. Culmination is 07:11 at 44.1° — 70% of the rate a zenith radiant would give — so the ceiling here is 0.6 an hour, not worth the sleep.

That ranks it 8th of twelve from Harbin this year, behind the Geminids (13.3/h) and the Perseids (11.8/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 01:12 bearing E, culminates 44.1° up at 07:11 towards south (180°), and sets at 13:10. It lies inside Aquarius. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 44.1° buys you 70% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

The dark hours here run 20:50 to 02:08 — 5 h 18 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 18:46 and sunrise at 04:12. Civil twilight ends at 19:20; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:29 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 27 minutes behind mean solar time at 126.65°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 Harbin. The Moon is 79% lit and only 4 of 8 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 23:28. Moonset 07:32. At the best hour it stands 13.8° above the horizon, 61° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 3.63.

Why 1 an hour and not 50

The published ZHR of 50 assumes the radiant overhead and a sky at limiting magnitude 6.5. Here the radiant reaches 18.3° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 3.63, which with r = 2.4 gives 0.6 an hour. Entry speed is 66.3 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 20:00 (radiant -43.3°) to 0.2 at 03:00 (radiant 18.3°), peaking at 0.6. That spread across 8 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 Harbin rather than the only one.

Watching from around Harbin

Harbin, Heilongjiang is the 54th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 5.24 million at 140 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Daqing (157 km NW), Jilin (212 km S), Changchun (233 km SSW) — 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.