eta-Aquariids from Nanjing in 2026

eta-Aquariids from Nanjing: the short answer

Marginal from Nanjing, Jiangsu. Maximum 17:01 on 6 May 2026; the radiant reaches 57.8° at 07:43 and the rate for this city's measured sky tops out at 1.2 an hour with the Moon 79% lit.

That ranks it 8th of twelve from Nanjing this year, behind the Geminids (22.2/h) and the Perseids (16.2/h).

The radiant track over this city

Aquarius carries the radiant. From Nanjing it clears the horizon at 01:44 on a bearing of 90° (E), reaches 57.8° at 07:43 in the south, and drops back below the horizon at 13:43. Within the observing window it peaks at 28.3°.

When it gets dark here

Nanjing loses the Sun at 18:48 and gets it back at 05:13. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 20:19 to 03:42, 7 h 23 min out of 10 h 25 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:01 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 5 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 118.78°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 Nanjing. The Moon is 79% lit and only 4 of 9 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 23:07. Moonset 08:58. At the best hour it stands 28.5° above the horizon, 60° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 3.75.

Why 1 an hour and not 50

Converting ZHR 50 into something useful for Nanjing means multiplying by sin(28.3°) and dividing by 2.4 raised to (6.5 − 3.75). That lands at 1.2 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 -58.0°) to 0.9 at 04:00 (radiant 28.3°), peaking at 1.2. That spread across 9 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 Nanjing rather than the only one.

Watching from around Nanjing

Nanjing, Jiangsu is the 26th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 9.31 million at 22 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Wuhu (85 km SSW), Changzhou (116 km ESE), Taizhou (116 km ENE) — 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.