eta-Aquariids from Melbourne in 2026

eta-Aquariids from Melbourne: the short answer

For Melbourne, Victoria, eta-Aquariids maximum lands at 19:01 on 6 May 2026. Culmination 07:58 at 52.3° — that is 79% of what the same stream would deliver with the radiant overhead — and the ceiling on the rate is 7.5 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 3rd of twelve from Melbourne this year, behind the Geminids (50.7/h) and the Orionids (10.3/h).

The radiant track over this city

At 37.8°S a declination-−0.5° radiant traces an arc from 01:58 to 14:00, topping out at 52.3° at 07:58 bearing 0°. Inside the dark window it only manages 43.5°, and that lower figure is the one the rates are built from. The radiant currently lies in Aquarius.

When it gets dark here

The dark hours here run 18:57 to 05:36 — 10 h 39 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 17:27 and sunrise at 07:06. Civil twilight ends at 17:55; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:16 here rather than at 00:00: Australia/Melbourne runs 20 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 144.96°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 Melbourne. The Moon is 80% lit and only 3 of 13 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 20:22. Moonset 11:58. At the best hour it stands 75.3° above the horizon, 60° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 4.99.

Why 8 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 43.5° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 4.99, which with r = 2.4 gives 7.5 an hour. Entry speed is 66.3 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 18:00 (radiant -43.0°) to 1.8 at 06:00 (radiant 43.5°), peaking at 7.5. That spread across 13 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 Melbourne rather than the only one.

Watching from around Melbourne

Melbourne, Victoria is the 50th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 5.44 million at 25 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Adelaide (654 km WNW), Sydney (713 km NE), Brisbane (1375 km NE) — 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.