Orionids from Sydney in 2026

Orionids from Sydney: the short answer

From Sydney, New South Wales (33.9°S, 58 m) the Orionids maximum of 05:23 on 22 October 2026 is not worth a broken night. The radiant culminates at 40.5° at 05:16, and against Sydney's own measured sky that converts to 1.9 meteors an hour at best.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from Sydney this year, behind the Geminids (9.0/h).

The radiant track over this city

At 33.9°S a declination-+15.7° radiant traces an arc from 23:59 to 10:32, topping out at 40.5° at 05:16 bearing 0°. Inside the dark window it only manages 40.3°, 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 Sydney is 19:13, civil twilight ends 19:39, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 20:41. It holds until 04:37, with sunrise at 06:05: 7 h 56 min of real darkness inside 10 h 53 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:39 here rather than at 00:00: Australia/Sydney runs 55 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 151.21°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 Sydney. The Moon is 77% lit and only 2 of 10 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 14:10. Moonset 03:38. At the best hour it stands 5.1° below the horizon, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 4.50.

Why 2 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 40.3° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 4.50, Sydney converts that ZHR into about 1.9 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 20:00 (radiant -49.0°) to 0.5 at 05:00 (radiant 40.3°), peaking at 1.9. 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 22 October 2026 is the best night from Sydney rather than the only one.

Watching from around Sydney

Sydney, New South Wales is the 48th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 5.64 million at 58 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Melbourne (713 km SW), Brisbane (733 km NNE), Adelaide (1162 km W) — 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.