Orionids from Abidjan in 2026

Orionids from Abidjan: the short answer

Maximum for the Orionids in 2026 is 18:23 Abidjan time on 21 October 2026. From 5.4°N the radiant gets to 79.7° at 04:36, the Moon is 81% lit, and the ideal-sky ceiling is 19.4 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 4th of twelve from Abidjan this year, behind the Geminids (133.4/h) and the Perseids (58.7/h).

The radiant track over this city

At 5.4°N a declination-+15.7° radiant traces an arc from 22:31 to 10:42, topping out at 79.7° at 04:36 bearing 0°. Inside the dark window it only manages 78.2°, and that lower figure is the one the rates are built from. The radiant currently lies in Orion.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Abidjan is 17:59, civil twilight ends 18:20, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 19:09. It holds until 04:51, with sunrise at 06:01: 9 h 41 min of real darkness inside 12 h 1 min of night.

Local solar midnight — the true middle of the night — lands within a minute of 00:00 here, because Africa/Abidjan happens to sit almost exactly over 4.00°W 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 Abidjan. The Moon is 81% lit and only 3 of 11 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 14:32. Moonset 02:45. At the best hour it stands 18.5° below the horizon, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 6.50.

Why 19 an hour and not 20

Zenithal hourly rate 20, population index 2.5, entry speed 66.1 km/s — very fast. Those are stream constants. What changes from city to city is the geometry: at 78.2° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 6.50, Abidjan converts that ZHR into about 19.4 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 19:00 (radiant -48.9°) to 6.7 at 05:00 (radiant 78.2°), peaking at 19.4. That spread across 11 hours is why a "what time" answer beats a "how many" answer.

The stream comes from Comet 1P/Halley and is listed as active 2 October to 7 November, so 21 October 2026 is the best night from Abidjan rather than the only one.

Watching from around Abidjan

Abidjan is the 47th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 6.32 million at 50 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Kumasi (302 km ENE), Accra (422 km E), Lomé (584 km E) — 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.