Orionids from Chengdu in 2026

Orionids from Chengdu: the short answer

For Chengdu, Sichuan, Orionids maximum lands at 02:23 on 22 October 2026. Culmination 05:24 at 75.0° — that is 97% of what the same stream would deliver with the radiant overhead — and the ceiling on the rate is 19.2 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 4th of twelve from Chengdu this year, behind the Geminids (149.9/h) and the Perseids (83.7/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 22:46 bearing ENE, culminates 75.0° up at 05:24 towards south (180°), and sets at 12:03. It lies inside Orion. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 75.0° buys you 97% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

Chengdu loses the Sun at 18:26 and gets it back at 07:10. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 19:46 to 05:50, 10 h 3 min out of 12 h 45 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:48 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 64 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 104.07°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 Chengdu. The Moon is 78% lit and only 4 of 12 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 15:33. Moonset 02:58. At the best hour it stands 25.6° below the horizon, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 6.50.

Why 19 an hour and not 20

Converting ZHR 20 into something useful for Chengdu means multiplying by sin(73.9°) and dividing by 2.5 raised to (6.5 − 6.50). That lands at 19.2 meteors an hour, from very fast 66.1 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 19:00 (radiant -38.4°) to 6.7 at 06:00 (radiant 73.0°), peaking at 19.2. That spread across 12 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 Chengdu rather than the only one.

Watching from around Chengdu

Chengdu, Sichuan is the 9th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 13.57 million at 499 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Mianyang (107 km NNE), Nanchong (193 km E), Chongqing (269 km ESE) — 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.