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 rate for this city's measured sky tops out at 0.1 an hour with the Moon 78% lit.

That ranks it 11th of twelve from Moscow this year, behind the Geminids (12.6/h) and the Perseids (10.5/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 1.48.

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 − 1.48). That lands at 0.1 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 0.1 at 03:00 (radiant 7.2°), peaking at 0.1. 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

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.