Orionids from Cape Town in 2026

Orionids from Cape Town: the short answer

Maximum for the Orionids in 2026 is 20:23 Cape Town time on 21 October 2026. From 33.9°S the radiant gets to 40.4° at 05:07, the Moon is 80% lit, and the ideal-sky ceiling is 12.3 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from Cape Town this year, behind the Geminids (60.7/h).

The radiant track over this city

Orion carries the radiant. From Cape Town it clears the horizon at 23:50 on a bearing of 71° (ENE), reaches 40.4° at 05:07 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 10:23. Within the observing window it peaks at 40.4°.

When it gets dark here

Cape Town loses the Sun at 19:04 and gets it back at 05:56. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 20:33 to 04:28, 7 h 55 min out of 10 h 52 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:30 here rather than at 00:00: Africa/Johannesburg runs 46 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 18.42°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 Cape Town. The Moon is 80% lit and only 2 of 10 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 14:23. Moonset 03:39. At the best hour it stands 4.9° below the horizon, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 6.50.

Why 12 an hour and not 20

Converting ZHR 20 into something useful for Cape Town means multiplying by sin(40.4°) and dividing by 2.5 raised to (6.5 − 6.50). That lands at 12.3 meteors an hour, from very fast 66.1 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 20:00 (radiant -47.2°) to 0.7 at 05:00 (radiant 40.4°), peaking at 12.3. 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 2 October to 7 November, so 21 October 2026 is the best night from Cape Town rather than the only one.

Watching from around Cape Town

Cape Town, Western Cape is the 60th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 4.77 million at 25 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Johannesburg (1262 km NE), Durban (1272 km ENE), Pretoria (1308 km NE) — 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.