Orionids from Mexico City in 2026

Orionids from Mexico City: the short answer

Marginal from Mexico City. Maximum 12:23 on 21 October 2026; the radiant reaches 86.2° at 04:57 and the rate for this city's measured sky tops out at 2.0 an hour with the Moon 82% lit.

That ranks it 5th of twelve from Mexico City this year, behind the Geminids (13.4/h) and the Perseids (10.1/h).

The radiant track over this city

Orion carries the radiant. From Mexico City it clears the horizon at 22:34 on a bearing of 73° (ENE), reaches 86.2° at 04:57 in the south, and drops back below the horizon at 11:19. Within the observing window it peaks at 86.2°.

When it gets dark here

Mexico City loses the Sun at 18:08 and gets it back at 06:33. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 19:22 to 05:19, 9 h 57 min out of 12 h 25 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:21 here rather than at 00:00: America/Mexico_City runs 37 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 99.13°W. 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 Mexico City. The Moon is 82% lit and only 3 of 12 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 15:14. Moonset 03:11. At the best hour it stands 11.8° 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 Mexico City means multiplying by sin(86.2°) and dividing by 2.5 raised to (6.5 − 4.00). That lands at 2.0 meteors an hour, from very fast 66.1 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 19:00 (radiant -43.8°) to 0.1 at 06:00 (radiant 74.5°), peaking at 2.0. 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 Mexico City rather than the only one.

Watching from around Mexico City

Mexico City is the 13th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 12.29 million at 2240 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Puebla (105 km ESE), Santiago de Querétaro (184 km NW), León de los Aldama (326 km NW) — 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.