Orionids from Harbin in 2026

Orionids from Harbin: the short answer

Marginal from Harbin, Heilongjiang. Maximum 02:23 on 22 October 2026; the radiant reaches 59.9° at 03:54 and the rate for this city's measured sky tops out at 1.8 an hour with the Moon 78% lit.

That ranks it 5th of twelve from Harbin this year, behind the Geminids (13.3/h) and the Perseids (11.8/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 20:47 bearing ENE, culminates 59.9° up at 03:54 towards south (180°), and sets at 11:01. It lies inside Orion. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 59.9° buys you 87% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

Harbin loses the Sun at 16:37 and gets it back at 05:58. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 18:17 to 04:19, 10 h 2 min out of 13 h 21 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:18 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 27 minutes behind mean solar time at 126.65°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 Harbin. The Moon is 78% lit and only 4 of 12 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 14:24. Moonset 01:06. At the best hour it stands 29.3° below the horizon, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 4.00.

Why 2 an hour and not 20

Converting ZHR 20 into something useful for Harbin means multiplying by sin(59.9°) and dividing by 2.5 raised to (6.5 − 4.00). That lands at 1.8 meteors an hour, from very fast 66.1 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 18:00 (radiant -22.4°) to 0.2 at 05:00 (radiant 56.9°), peaking at 1.8. 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 Harbin rather than the only one.

Watching from around Harbin

Harbin, Heilongjiang is the 54th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 5.24 million at 140 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Daqing (157 km NW), Jilin (212 km S), Changchun (233 km SSW) — 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.