Perseids from Chengdu in 2026

Perseids from Chengdu: the short answer

Chengdu, Sichuan is at 30.7°N and 499 m, which puts the Perseids radiant 62.7° up at culmination (06:50 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 17.3 an hour, and 02:00–06:00 is the stretch to be outside.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from Chengdu this year, behind the Geminids (22.2/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 20:06 bearing N, culminates 62.7° up at 06:50 towards north (0°), and sets at 17:32. It lies inside Cassiopeia. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 62.7° buys you 89% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

The dark hours here run 21:16 to 05:01 — 7 h 45 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 19:48 and sunrise at 06:28. Civil twilight ends at 20:14; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 01:08 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 64 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 104.07°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 10 of the 10 sampled dark hours, so moonlight subtracts essentially nothing here. Moonrise 06:46. Moonset 19:38. At the best hour the limiting magnitude reaches 4.50 — the full value for this city's measured sky.

Why 17 an hour and not 100

The published ZHR of 100 assumes the radiant overhead and a sky at limiting magnitude 6.5. Here the radiant reaches 61.4° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 4.50, which with r = 2.2 gives 17.3 an hour. Entry speed is 58.8 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.4 at 21:00 (radiant 2.7°) to 0.6 at 06:00 (radiant 61.4°), peaking at 17.3. That spread across 10 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 Chengdu rather than the only one.

Watching from around Chengdu

Chengdu, Sichuan is the 9th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 13.57 million at 499 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Mianyang (107 km NNE), Nanchong (193 km E), Chongqing (269 km ESE) — 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.