Orionids from Santiago in 2026

Orionids from Santiago: the short answer

The Orionids peaks at 15:23 local time on 21 October 2026 over Santiago. Culmination is 06:03 at 40.9° — 65% of the rate a zenith radiant would give — so the ceiling here is 1.3 an hour, not worth the sleep.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from Santiago this year, behind the Geminids (5.6/h).

The radiant track over this city

Orion carries the radiant. From Santiago it clears the horizon at 00:46 on a bearing of 71° (ENE), reaches 40.9° at 06:03 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 11:20. Within the observing window it peaks at 40.9°.

When it gets dark here

The dark hours here run 21:28 to 05:25 — 7 h 57 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 20:00 and sunrise at 06:53. Civil twilight ends at 20:26; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 01:26 here rather than at 00:00: America/Santiago runs 103 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 70.65°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 Santiago. The Moon is 82% lit and only 2 of 10 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 15:35. Moonset 04:41. At the best hour it stands 4.5° below the horizon, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 4.00.

Why 1 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 40.9° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 4.00, which with r = 2.5 gives 1.3 an hour. Entry speed is 66.1 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 21:00 (radiant -46.5°) to 0.2 at 06:00 (radiant 40.9°), peaking at 1.3. That spread across 10 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 Santiago rather than the only one.

Watching from around Santiago

Santiago is the 59th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 4.84 million at 556 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Córdoba (648 km ENE), Buenos Aires (1137 km E), Asunción (1551 km ENE) — 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.