Orionids from Saint Petersburg in 2026

Orionids from Saint Petersburg: the short answer

From Saint Petersburg, St.-Petersburg (59.9°N, 11 m) the Orionids maximum of 21:23 on 21 October 2026 is not worth a broken night. The radiant culminates at 45.7° at 05:19, and against Saint Petersburg's own measured sky that converts to 1.4 meteors an hour at best.

That ranks it 5th of twelve from Saint Petersburg this year, behind the Geminids (12.2/h) and the Quadrantids (8.2/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 21:24 bearing ENE, culminates 45.7° up at 05:19 towards south (180°), and sets at 13:15. It lies inside Orion. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 45.7° buys you 72% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Saint Petersburg is 17:33, civil twilight ends 18:16, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 19:52. It holds until 05:35, with sunrise at 07:54: 9 h 43 min of real darkness inside 14 h 22 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:43 here rather than at 00:00: Europe/Moscow runs 59 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 30.31°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 Saint Petersburg. The Moon is 79% lit and only 5 of 13 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 16:28. Moonset 02:23. At the best hour it stands 12.1° below the horizon, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 4.00.

Why 1 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 45.6° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 4.00, Saint Petersburg converts that ZHR into about 1.4 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 19:00 (radiant -11.8°) to 0.1 at 07:00 (radiant 42.1°), peaking at 1.4. That spread across 13 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 Saint Petersburg rather than the only one.

Watching from around Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg, St.-Petersburg is the 52nd largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 5.35 million at 11 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Moscow (635 km SE), Stockholm (691 km W), Minsk (692 km SSW) — 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.