eta-Aquariids from London in 2026

eta-Aquariids from London: the short answer

The eta-Aquariids peaks at 10:01 local time on 6 May 2026 over London, England. Culmination is 08:39 at 38.1° — 62% of the rate a zenith radiant would give — so the ceiling here is 1.2 an hour, not worth the sleep.

That ranks it 12th of twelve from London this year, behind the Geminids (141.5/h) and the Perseids (84.4/h).

The radiant track over this city

Aquarius carries the radiant. From London it clears the horizon at 02:42 on a bearing of 91° (E), reaches 38.1° at 08:39 in the south, and drops back below the horizon at 14:37. Within the observing window it peaks at 12.0°.

When it gets dark here

The dark hours here run 23:08 to 02:45 — 3 h 37 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 20:30 and sunrise at 05:23. Civil twilight ends at 21:09; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:56 here rather than at 00:00: Europe/London runs 61 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 0.13°W. 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 London. The Moon is 84% lit and only 4 of 7 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 01:04. Moonset 07:43. At the best hour it stands 7.8° above the horizon, 68° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 5.70.

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 12.0° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 5.70, which with r = 2.4 gives 1.2 an hour. Entry speed is 66.3 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 22:00 (radiant -36.3°) to 0.4 at 04:00 (radiant 12.0°), peaking at 1.2. That spread across 7 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 London rather than the only one.

Watching from around London

London, England is the 28th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 8.96 million at 25 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Paris (344 km SSE), Hamburg (720 km ENE), Munich (918 km ESE) — 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.