Perseids from Cape Town in 2026

Perseids from Cape Town: the short answer

Cape Town, Western Cape sits at 33.9°S, 18.42°E, and the Perseids radiant never rises here. Maximum falls at 04:00 local time on 13 August 2026, but the radiant's best altitude over the whole 24 hours is -1.9° — still below the horizon. At declination +57.9° it would need a latitude south of about -32° to clear it, and this city is 1.9° short.

The radiant track over this city

Over the full 24 hours of 13 August 2026 the radiant — declination +57.9°, right ascension 47.8°, inside the boundaries of Cassiopeia — swings between -1.9° and well below that, never touching the Cape Town horizon. The shower is a northern-hemisphere event and this is a southern-hemisphere city 33.9° from the equator.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Cape Town is 18:14, civil twilight ends 18:40, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 19:39. It holds until 06:03, with sunrise at 07:27: 10 h 24 min of real darkness inside 13 h 13 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:51 here rather than at 00:00: Africa/Johannesburg runs 46 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 18.42°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 13 of the 13 sampled dark hours, so moonlight subtracts essentially nothing here. Moonrise 07:53. Moonset 18:03. At the best hour the limiting magnitude reaches 1.49 — the full value for this city's measured sky.

Why 0 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 -2.1° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 1.49, Cape Town converts that ZHR into about 0.0 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 19:00 (radiant -65.6°) to 0.0 at 07:00 (radiant -2.1°), peaking at 0.0. That spread across 13 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 Cape Town rather than the only one.

Watching from around Cape Town

Cape Town, Western Cape is the 60th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 4.77 million at 25 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Johannesburg (1262 km NE), Durban (1272 km ENE), Pretoria (1308 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.