eta-Aquariids from Mexico City in 2026

eta-Aquariids from Mexico City: the short answer

Mexico City is at 19.4°N and 2240 m, which puts the eta-Aquariids radiant 70.3° up at culmination (08:15 local time) on the night of maximum, 6 May 2026. Peak activity is 03:01, the reference-sky rate tops out at 8.0 an hour, and 04:00–05:00 is the stretch to be outside.

That ranks it 7th of twelve from Mexico City this year, behind the Geminids (145.8/h) and the Perseids (71.1/h).

The radiant track over this city

Aquarius carries the radiant. From Mexico City it clears the horizon at 02:15 on a bearing of 90° (E), reaches 70.3° at 08:15 in the south, and drops back below the horizon at 14:15. Within the observing window it peaks at 38.2°.

When it gets dark here

Mexico City loses the Sun at 19:00 and gets it back at 06:05. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 20:19 to 04:46, 8 h 28 min out of 11 h 5 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:33 here rather than at 00:00: America/Mexico_City runs 37 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 99.13°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 Mexico City. The Moon is 82% lit and only 3 of 10 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 22:45. Moonset 09:41. At the best hour it stands 42.3° above the horizon, 64° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 5.41.

Why 8 an hour and not 50

Converting ZHR 50 into something useful for Mexico City means multiplying by sin(38.2°) and dividing by 2.4 raised to (6.5 − 5.41). That lands at 8.0 meteors an hour, from very fast 66.3 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 20:00 (radiant -70.6°) to 4.0 at 05:00 (radiant 38.2°), peaking at 8.0. That spread across 10 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 Mexico City rather than the only one.

Watching from around Mexico City

Mexico City is the 13th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 12.29 million at 2240 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Puebla (105 km ESE), Santiago de Querétaro (184 km NW), León de los Aldama (326 km NW) — 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.