eta-Aquariids from Jakarta in 2026

eta-Aquariids from Jakarta: the short answer

Marginal from Jakarta. Maximum 16:01 on 6 May 2026; the radiant reaches 83.9° at 07:30 and the rate for this city's measured sky tops out at 1.5 an hour with the Moon 79% lit.

That ranks it 6th of twelve from Jakarta this year, behind the Geminids (17.4/h) and the Perseids (8.0/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 01:31 bearing E, culminates 83.9° up at 07:30 towards north (0°), and sets at 13:31. It lies inside Aquarius. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 83.9° buys you 99% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

Jakarta loses the Sun at 17:45 and gets it back at 05:53. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 18:57 to 04:41, 9 h 44 min out of 12 h 8 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:49 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Jakarta runs 7 minutes behind mean solar time at 106.85°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 Jakarta. The Moon is 79% lit and only 3 of 11 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 21:25. Moonset 10:15. At the best hour it stands 68.9° above the horizon, 59° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 3.05.

Why 2 an hour and not 50

Converting ZHR 50 into something useful for Jakarta means multiplying by sin(51.8°) and dividing by 2.4 raised to (6.5 − 3.05). That lands at 1.5 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 -79.8°) to 0.7 at 05:00 (radiant 51.8°), peaking at 1.5. 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 Jakarta rather than the only one.

Watching from around Jakarta

Jakarta is the 30th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 8.54 million at 16 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Bandung (115 km SE), Semarang (404 km ESE), Palembang (434 km NNW) — 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.