Perseids from Beijing in 2026

Perseids from Beijing: the short answer

Beijing is at 39.9°N and 49 m, which puts the Perseids radiant 72.0° up at culmination (06:00 local time) on the night of maximum, 13 August 2026. Peak activity is 10:00, the rate on this city's own measured sky tops out at 11.6 an hour, and 00:00–04:00 is the stretch to be outside.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from Beijing this year, behind the Geminids (13.6/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant is circumpolar from 39.9°N: it never sets. Over the night it swings between its low point and 72.0° at 06:00, bearing N (0°) at culmination. It sits inside Cassiopeia, and because it is above the horizon for every dark hour, what limits you here is darkness and moonlight, not geometry.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Beijing is 19:15, civil twilight ends 19:44, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 20:58. It holds until 03:41, with sunrise at 05:23: 6 h 43 min of real darkness inside 10 h 9 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:19 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 14 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 116.40°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

The Moon is 0% illuminated and below the horizon for 9 of the 9 sampled dark hours, so moonlight subtracts essentially nothing here. Moonrise 05:39. Moonset 19:05. At the best hour the limiting magnitude reaches 4.00 — the full value for this city's measured sky.

Why 12 an hour and not 100

Zenithal hourly rate 100, population index 2.2, entry speed 58.8 km/s — fast. Those are stream constants. What changes from city to city is the geometry: at 63.6° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 4.00, Beijing converts that ZHR into about 11.6 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.2 at 20:00 (radiant 10.9°) to 5.8 at 04:00 (radiant 63.6°), peaking at 11.6. That spread across 9 hours is why a "what time" answer beats a "how many" answer.

The stream comes from Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle and is listed as active 17 July to 24 August, so 13 August 2026 is the best night from Beijing rather than the only one.

Watching from around Beijing

Beijing is the 2nd largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 18.96 million at 49 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Tianjin (108 km SE), Baoding (140 km SW), Tangshan (155 km E) — 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.