eta-Aquariids from Ho Chi Minh City in 2026

eta-Aquariids from Ho Chi Minh City: the short answer

Marginal from Ho Chi Minh City. Maximum 16:01 on 6 May 2026; the radiant reaches 79.1° at 07:31 and the rate for this city's measured sky tops out at 1.8 an hour with the Moon 79% lit.

That ranks it 6th of twelve from Ho Chi Minh City this year, behind the Geminids (20.7/h) and the Perseids (13.0/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 01:32 bearing E, culminates 79.1° up at 07:31 towards south (180°), and sets at 13:32. It lies inside Aquarius. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 79.1° buys you 98% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

Ho Chi Minh City loses the Sun at 18:06 and gets it back at 05:33. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 19:20 to 04:19, 8 h 59 min out of 11 h 27 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:49 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh runs 7 minutes behind mean solar time at 106.63°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 Ho Chi Minh City. The Moon is 79% lit and only 4 of 11 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 22:02. Moonset 09:41. At the best hour it stands 51.7° above the horizon, 59° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 3.28.

Why 2 an hour and not 50

Converting ZHR 50 into something useful for Ho Chi Minh City means multiplying by sin(50.7°) and dividing by 2.4 raised to (6.5 − 3.28). That lands at 1.8 meteors an hour, from very fast 66.3 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 19:00 (radiant -76.8°) to 0.2 at 05:00 (radiant 50.7°), peaking at 1.8. That spread across 11 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 Ho Chi Minh City rather than the only one.

Watching from around Ho Chi Minh City

Ho Chi Minh City is the 8th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 14.00 million at 7 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Cần Thơ (127 km SW), Phnom Penh (204 km WNW), Bangkok (741 km WNW) — 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.