eta-Aquariids from Moscow in 2026

eta-Aquariids from Moscow: the short answer

Marginal from Moscow. Maximum 12:01 on 6 May 2026; the radiant reaches 34.2° at 08:07 and the ideal-sky rate tops out at 0.2 an hour with the Moon 78% lit.

That ranks it 12th of twelve from Moscow this year, behind the Geminids (137.0/h) and the Perseids (75.7/h).

The radiant track over this city

Aquarius carries the radiant. From Moscow it clears the horizon at 02:08 on a bearing of 90° (E), reaches 34.2° at 08:07 in the south, and drops back below the horizon at 14:06. Within the observing window it peaks at 7.2°.

When it gets dark here

Moscow gets no astronomical darkness on this date: sunset 20:17, sunrise 04:34, 8 h 17 min of night, and the Sun never drops the full 18° below the horizon in between. At 55.8°N that is a seasonal fact, not a local one, and it costs you the faintest meteors all night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:25 here rather than at 00:00: Europe/Moscow runs 30 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 37.62°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

The Moon is 78% lit and out of the way for 4 of the 6 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 01:43. Moonset 07:37. At the best hour it is 4.3° above the horizon, 58° from the radiant, and the limiting magnitude works out at 2.44.

Why 0 an hour and not 50

Converting ZHR 50 into something useful for Moscow means multiplying by sin(7.2°) and dividing by 2.4 raised to (6.5 − 2.44). That lands at 0.2 meteors an hour, from very fast 66.3 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 22:00 (radiant -30.0°) to 0.2 at 03:00 (radiant 7.2°), peaking at 0.2. That spread across 6 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 Moscow rather than the only one.

Watching from around Moscow

Moscow is the 18th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 10.38 million at 155 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Saint Petersburg (635 km NW), Minsk (675 km WSW), Kyiv (755 km SW) — 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.