Orionids from Melbourne in 2026

Orionids from Melbourne: the short answer

Melbourne, Victoria is at 37.8°S and 25 m, which puts the Orionids radiant 36.5° up at culmination (05:41 local time) on the night of maximum, 22 October 2026. Peak activity is 05:23, the reference-sky rate tops out at 10.3 an hour, and 04:00–05:00 is the stretch to be outside.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from Melbourne this year, behind the Geminids (50.7/h).

The radiant track over this city

At 37.8°S a declination-+15.7° radiant traces an arc from 00:31 to 10:50, topping out at 36.5° at 05:41 bearing 0°. Inside the dark window it only manages 35.7°, and that lower figure is the one the rates are built from. The radiant currently lies in Orion.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Melbourne is 19:43, civil twilight ends 20:10, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 21:17. It holds until 04:51, with sunrise at 06:25: 7 h 35 min of real darkness inside 10 h 43 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 01:04 here rather than at 00:00: Australia/Melbourne runs 80 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 144.96°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 Melbourne. The Moon is 77% lit and only 1 of 9 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 14:30. Moonset 04:08. At the best hour it stands 0.7° above the horizon, 123° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 6.48.

Why 10 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 35.7° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 6.48, Melbourne converts that ZHR into about 10.3 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 21:00 (radiant -41.2°) to 5.9 at 05:00 (radiant 35.7°), peaking at 10.3. That spread across 9 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 Melbourne rather than the only one.

Watching from around Melbourne

Melbourne, Victoria is the 50th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 5.44 million at 25 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Adelaide (654 km WNW), Sydney (713 km NE), Brisbane (1375 km NE) — 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.