eta-Aquariids from Tehran in 2026

eta-Aquariids from Tehran: the short answer

The eta-Aquariids reaches maximum at 12:31 local time on 6 May 2026 over Tehran (35.7°N, 51.42°E, 1178 m). The radiant culminates 54.2° high at 07:42 and the useful window runs 03:00–04:00, with an ideal-sky ceiling of 7.6 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 7th of twelve from Tehran this year, behind the Geminids (149.7/h) and the Perseids (81.1/h).

The radiant track over this city

At 35.7°N a declination-−0.5° radiant traces an arc from 01:43 to 13:42, topping out at 54.2° at 07:42 bearing 180°. Inside the dark window it only manages 27.2°, and that lower figure is the one the rates are built from. The radiant currently lies in Aquarius.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Tehran is 18:54, civil twilight ends 19:22, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 20:31. It holds until 03:29, with sunrise at 05:06: 6 h 58 min of real darkness inside 10 h 12 min of night.

Local solar midnight — the true middle of the night — lands within a minute of 00:00 here, because Asia/Tehran happens to sit almost exactly over 51.42°E once the equation of time is taken out. Most cities are not that lucky; the clock and the sky usually disagree by tens of minutes.

What the Moon does here

Moonlight is the limiting factor on this night from Tehran. The Moon is 78% lit and only 4 of 9 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 23:27. Moonset 08:56. At the best hour it stands 24.8° above the horizon, 58° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 5.86.

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 27.2° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 5.86, Tehran converts that ZHR into about 7.6 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 20:00 (radiant -54.3°) to 1.4 at 04:00 (radiant 27.2°), peaking at 7.6. 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 Tehran rather than the only one.

Watching from around Tehran

Tehran is the 41st largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 7.15 million at 1178 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Isfahan (339 km S), Baku (538 km NNW), Basrah (669 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.