Orionids from Hyderabad in 2026

Orionids from Hyderabad: the short answer

The Orionids reaches maximum at 23:53 local time on 21 October 2026 over Hyderabad, Telangana (17.4°N, 78.46°E, 515 m). The radiant culminates 88.3° high at 04:37 and the useful window runs 02:00–06:00, with an ideal-sky ceiling of 19.7 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 4th of twelve from Hyderabad this year, behind the Geminids (144.6/h) and the Perseids (68.9/h).

The radiant track over this city

At 17.4°N a declination-+15.7° radiant traces an arc from 22:17 to 10:57, topping out at 88.3° at 04:37 bearing 180°. Inside the dark window it only manages 84.3°, 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 19:03 to 04:58 — 9 h 55 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 17:50 and sunrise at 06:11. Civil twilight ends at 18:12; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight — the true middle of the night — lands within a minute of 00:00 here, because Asia/Kolkata happens to sit almost exactly over 78.46°E once the equation of time is taken out. Most cities are not that lucky; the clock and the sky usually disagree by tens of minutes.

What the Moon does here

Moonlight is the limiting factor on this night from Hyderabad. The Moon is 79% lit and only 3 of 11 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 14:34. Moonset 02:26. At the best hour it stands 22.1° below the horizon, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 6.50.

Why 20 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 84.3° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 6.50, which with r = 2.5 gives 19.7 an hour. Entry speed is 66.1 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 19:00 (radiant -41.8°) to 16.3 at 05:00 (radiant 84.3°), peaking at 19.7. That spread across 11 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 Hyderabad rather than the only one.

Watching from around Hyderabad

Hyderabad, Telangana is the 43rd largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 6.99 million at 515 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Nagpur (424 km N), Bengaluru (499 km S), Pune (503 km WNW) — 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.