Orionids from Johannesburg in 2026

Orionids from Johannesburg: the short answer

From Johannesburg, Gauteng (26.2°S, 1767 m) the Orionids maximum of 20:23 on 21 October 2026 is not worth a broken night. The radiant culminates at 48.1° at 04:28, and against Johannesburg's own measured sky that converts to 2.4 meteors an hour at best.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from Johannesburg this year, behind the Geminids (11.6/h).

The radiant track over this city

Orion carries the radiant. From Johannesburg it clears the horizon at 23:00 on a bearing of 73° (ENE), reaches 48.1° at 04:28 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 09:56. Within the observing window it peaks at 47.6°.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Johannesburg is 18:17, civil twilight ends 18:41, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 19:38. It holds until 04:06, with sunrise at 05:26: 8 h 28 min of real darkness inside 11 h 9 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:52 here rather than at 00:00: Africa/Johannesburg runs 8 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 28.04°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 Johannesburg. The Moon is 80% lit and only 3 of 11 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 13:52. Moonset 02:53. At the best hour it stands 14.9° below the horizon, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 4.50.

Why 2 an hour and not 20

Zenithal hourly rate 20, population index 2.5, entry speed 66.1 km/s — very fast. Those are stream constants. What changes from city to city is the geometry: at 47.6° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 4.50, Johannesburg converts that ZHR into about 2.4 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 19:00 (radiant -53.3°) to 0.0 at 05:00 (radiant 47.5°), peaking at 2.4. 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 Johannesburg rather than the only one.

Watching from around Johannesburg

Johannesburg, Gauteng is the 25th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 9.42 million at 1767 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Pretoria (53 km NNE), Durban (501 km SE), Harare (981 km NNE) — 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.