eta-Aquariids from Sydney in 2026

eta-Aquariids from Sydney: the short answer

Sydney, New South Wales is at 33.9°S and 58 m, which puts the eta-Aquariids radiant 56.3° up at culmination (07:33 local time) on the night of maximum, 6 May 2026. Peak activity is 19:01, the reference-sky rate tops out at 8.8 an hour, and 04:00–06:00 is the stretch to be outside.

That ranks it 3rd of twelve from Sydney this year, behind the Geminids (60.8/h) and the Orionids (12.1/h).

The radiant track over this city

At 33.9°S a declination-−0.5° radiant traces an arc from 01:33 to 13:35, topping out at 56.3° at 07:33 bearing 0°. Inside the dark window it only manages 49.8°, and that lower figure is the one the rates are built from. The radiant currently lies in Aquarius.

When it gets dark here

The dark hours here run 18:35 to 05:08 — 10 h 33 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 17:09 and sunrise at 06:34. Civil twilight ends at 17:36; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:51 here rather than at 00:00: Australia/Sydney runs 5 minutes behind mean solar time at 151.21°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 Sydney. The Moon is 80% lit and only 3 of 13 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 20:10. Moonset 11:20. At the best hour it stands 73.1° above the horizon, 60° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 5.00.

Why 9 an hour and not 50

The published ZHR of 50 assumes the radiant overhead and a sky at limiting magnitude 6.5. Here the radiant reaches 49.8° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 5.00, which with r = 2.4 gives 8.8 an hour. Entry speed is 66.3 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 18:00 (radiant -49.3°) to 0.2 at 06:00 (radiant 49.8°), peaking at 8.8. That spread across 13 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 Sydney rather than the only one.

Watching from around Sydney

Sydney, New South Wales is the 48th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 5.64 million at 58 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Melbourne (713 km SW), Brisbane (733 km NNE), Adelaide (1162 km W) — 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.