Orionids from New York City in 2026

Orionids from New York City: the short answer

The Orionids peaks at 14:23 local time on 21 October 2026 over New York City. Culmination is 05:16 at 64.9° — 91% of the rate a zenith radiant would give — so the ceiling here is 1.8 an hour, not worth the sleep.

That ranks it 5th of twelve from New York City this year, behind the Geminids (13.6/h) and the Perseids (11.9/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 22:21 bearing ENE, culminates 64.9° up at 05:16 towards south (180°), and sets at 12:13. It lies inside Orion. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 64.9° buys you 91% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

The dark hours here run 19:38 to 05:43 — 10 h 5 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 18:06 and sunrise at 07:15. Civil twilight ends at 18:34; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:40 here rather than at 00:00: America/New_York runs 56 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 74.01°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 New York City. The Moon is 82% lit and only 3 of 12 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 15:51. Moonset 03:12. At the best hour it stands 9.4° below the horizon, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 4.00.

Why 2 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 64.7° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 4.00, which with r = 2.5 gives 1.8 an hour. Entry speed is 66.1 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 19:00 (radiant -28.8°) to 0.7 at 06:00 (radiant 63.2°), 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 21 October 2026 is the best night from New York City rather than the only one.

Watching from around New York City

New York City is the 29th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 8.80 million at 10 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Philadelphia (130 km SW), Montréal (534 km N), Toronto (555 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.