Perseids from Cairo in 2026

Perseids from Cairo: the short answer

Maximum for the Perseids in 2026 is 05:00 Cairo time on 13 August 2026. From 30.1°N the radiant gets to 62.1° at 06:41, the Moon is 0% lit, and this city's measured-sky ceiling is 10.8 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from Cairo this year, behind the Geminids (13.8/h).

The radiant track over this city

Cassiopeia carries the radiant. From Cairo it clears the horizon at 20:11 on a bearing of 12° (NNE), reaches 62.1° at 06:41 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 17:10. Within the observing window it peaks at 57.0°.

When it gets dark here

Cairo loses the Sun at 19:39 and gets it back at 06:21. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 21:05 to 04:54, 7 h 48 min out of 10 h 42 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 01:00 here rather than at 00:00: Africa/Cairo runs 55 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 31.25°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 06:52. Moonset 19:36. At the best hour the limiting magnitude reaches 4.00 — the full value for this city's measured sky.

Why 11 an hour and not 100

Converting ZHR 100 into something useful for Cairo means multiplying by sin(57.0°) and dividing by 2.2 raised to (6.5 − 4.00). That lands at 10.8 meteors an hour, from fast 58.8 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.5 at 21:00 (radiant 2.7°) to 8.8 at 05:00 (radiant 57.0°), peaking at 10.8. 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 Cairo rather than the only one.

Watching from around Cairo

Cairo is the 23rd largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 9.61 million at 23 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Alexandria (180 km NW), Beirut (585 km NE), Damascus (611 km NE) — 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.