eta-Aquariids from New York City in 2026

eta-Aquariids from New York City: the short answer

New York City is at 40.7°N and 10 m, which puts the eta-Aquariids radiant 49.0° up at culmination (08:35 local time) on the night of maximum, 6 May 2026. Peak activity is 05:01, the reference-sky rate tops out at 8.2 an hour, and 04:00–05:00 is the stretch to be outside.

That ranks it 7th of twelve from New York City this year, behind the Geminids (148.4/h) and the Perseids (85.7/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 02:36 bearing E, culminates 49.0° up at 08:35 towards south (180°), and sets at 14:33. It lies inside Aquarius. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 49.0° buys you 75% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over New York City is 19:56, civil twilight ends 20:26, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 21:44. It holds until 04:00, with sunrise at 05:48: 6 h 17 min of real darkness inside 9 h 52 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:52 here rather than at 00:00: America/New_York runs 56 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 74.01°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 New York City. The Moon is 83% lit and only 4 of 9 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 00:08. Moonset 08:51. At the best hour it stands 20.5° above the horizon, 65° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 5.93.

Why 8 an hour and not 50

Zenithal hourly rate 50, population index 2.4, entry speed 66.3 km/s — very fast. Those are stream constants. What changes from city to city is the geometry: at 26.4° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 5.93, New York City converts that ZHR into about 8.2 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 21:00 (radiant -49.4°) to 0.3 at 05:00 (radiant 26.4°), peaking at 8.2. 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 New York City rather than the only one.

Watching from around New York City

New York City is the 29th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 8.80 million at 10 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Philadelphia (130 km SW), Montréal (534 km N), Toronto (555 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.