Orionids from Beijing in 2026

Orionids from Beijing: the short answer

The Orionids peaks at 02:23 local time on 22 October 2026 over Beijing. Culmination is 04:35 at 65.7° — 91% of the rate a zenith radiant would give — so the ceiling here is 1.8 an hour, not worth the sleep.

That ranks it 5th of twelve from Beijing this year, behind the Geminids (13.6/h) and the Perseids (11.6/h).

The radiant track over this city

At 39.9°N a declination-+15.7° radiant traces an arc from 21:41 to 11:29, topping out at 65.7° at 04:35 bearing 180°. Inside the dark window it only manages 65.2°, and that lower figure is the one the rates are built from. The radiant currently lies in Orion.

When it gets dark here

The dark hours here run 18:57 to 05:01 — 10 h 4 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 17:26 and sunrise at 06:31. Civil twilight ends at 17:54; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:59 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 14 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 116.40°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 Beijing. The Moon is 78% lit and only 5 of 13 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 14:56. Moonset 01:57. At the best hour it stands 23.1° below the horizon, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 4.00.

Why 2 an hour and not 20

The published ZHR of 20 assumes the radiant overhead and a sky at limiting magnitude 6.5. Here the radiant reaches 65.2° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 4.00, which with r = 2.5 gives 1.8 an hour. Entry speed is 66.1 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 18:00 (radiant -31.1°) to 0.1 at 06:00 (radiant 59.5°), peaking at 1.8. 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 2 October to 7 November, so 22 October 2026 is the best night from Beijing rather than the only one.

Watching from around Beijing

Beijing is the 2nd largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 18.96 million at 49 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Tianjin (108 km SE), Baoding (140 km SW), Tangshan (155 km E) — 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.