eta-Aquariids from Xi’an in 2026

eta-Aquariids from Xi’an: the short answer

The eta-Aquariids peaks at 17:01 local time on 6 May 2026 over Xi’an, Shaanxi. Culmination is 08:22 at 55.6° — 83% of the rate a zenith radiant would give — so the ceiling here is 1.6 an hour, not worth the sleep.

That ranks it 7th of twelve from Xi’an this year, behind the Geminids (22.2/h) and the Perseids (17.0/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 02:23 bearing E, culminates 55.6° up at 08:22 towards south (180°), and sets at 14:22. It lies inside Aquarius. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 55.6° buys you 83% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

The dark hours here run 21:06 to 04:14 — 7 h 8 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 19:31 and sunrise at 05:49. Civil twilight ends at 19:59; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:40 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 44 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 108.93°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 Xi’an. The Moon is 79% lit and only 4 of 10 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 23:55. Moonset 09:31. At the best hour it stands 27.3° above the horizon, 60° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 3.79.

Why 2 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 31.5° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 3.79, which with r = 2.4 gives 1.6 an hour. Entry speed is 66.3 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 20:00 (radiant -55.6°) to 0.3 at 05:00 (radiant 31.5°), peaking at 1.6. That spread across 10 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 Xi’an rather than the only one.

Watching from around Xi’an

Xi’an, Shaanxi is the 24th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 9.60 million at 416 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Baoji (156 km W), Qingyang (199 km NW), Shiyan (248 km SE) — 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.