Orionids from Delhi in 2026

Orionids from Delhi: the short answer

Delhi is at 28.7°N and 227 m, which puts the Orionids radiant 77.0° up at culmination (04:42 local time) on the night of maximum, 21 October 2026. Peak activity is 23:53, the reference-sky rate tops out at 19.4 an hour, and 02:00–06:00 is the stretch to be outside.

That ranks it 4th of twelve from Delhi this year, behind the Geminids (149.1/h) and the Perseids (80.2/h).

The radiant track over this city

At 28.7°N a declination-+15.7° radiant traces an arc from 22:07 to 11:17, topping out at 77.0° at 04:42 bearing 180°. Inside the dark window it only manages 76.4°, 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 19:04 to 05:07 — 10 h 3 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 17:45 and sunrise at 06:26. Civil twilight ends at 18:09; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:05 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Kolkata runs 21 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 77.23°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 Delhi. The Moon is 79% lit and only 4 of 12 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 14:50. Moonset 02:22. At the best hour it stands 33.7° below the horizon, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 6.50.

Why 19 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 76.4° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 6.50, which with r = 2.5 gives 19.4 an hour. Entry speed is 66.1 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 19:00 (radiant -34.6°) to 0.1 at 06:00 (radiant 67.8°), peaking at 19.4. 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 21 October 2026 is the best night from Delhi rather than the only one.

Watching from around Delhi

Delhi is the 16th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 11.03 million at 227 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Jaipur (239 km SW), Ludhiana (284 km NNW), Kanpur (392 km SE) — 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.