eta-Aquariids from Saint Petersburg in 2026

eta-Aquariids from Saint Petersburg: the short answer

From Saint Petersburg, St.-Petersburg (59.9°N, 11 m) the eta-Aquariids maximum of 12:01 on 6 May 2026 is not worth a broken night. The radiant culminates at 30.0° at 08:37, and on the reference rural sky that converts to 0.0 meteors an hour at best.

That ranks it 12th of twelve from Saint Petersburg this year, behind the Geminids (132.7/h) and the Quadrantids (52.3/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 02:37 bearing E, culminates 30.0° up at 08:37 towards south (180°), and sets at 14:35. It lies inside Aquarius. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 30.0° buys you 50% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

Saint Petersburg gets no astronomical darkness on this date: sunset 21:08, sunrise 04:41, 7 h 33 min of night, and the Sun never drops the full 18° below the horizon in between. At 59.9°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 00:54 here rather than at 00:00: Europe/Moscow runs 59 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 30.31°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% illuminated and below the horizon for 5 of the 5 sampled dark hours, so moonlight subtracts essentially nothing here. Moonrise 03:04. Moonset 07:16. At the best hour the limiting magnitude reaches 2.10 — the reference sky's full value.

Why 0 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 2.8° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 2.10, Saint Petersburg converts that ZHR into about 0.0 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 23:00 (radiant -24.2°) to 0.0 at 03:00 (radiant 2.8°), peaking at 0.0. That spread across 5 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 Saint Petersburg rather than the only one.

Watching from around Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg, St.-Petersburg is the 52nd largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 5.35 million at 11 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Moscow (635 km SE), Stockholm (691 km W), Minsk (692 km SSW) — 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.