Perseids from Chongqing in 2026

Perseids from Chongqing: the short answer

The Perseids reaches maximum at 10:00 local time on 13 August 2026 over Chongqing (29.6°N, 106.56°E, 289 m). The radiant culminates 61.6° high at 06:40 and the useful window runs 02:00–06:00, with a ceiling of 15.9 meteors an hour on Chongqing's own measured sky.

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

The radiant track over this city

At 29.6°N a declination-+57.9° radiant traces an arc from 20:21 to 16:57, topping out at 61.6° at 06:40 bearing 0°. Inside the dark window it only manages 56.7°, and that lower figure is the one the rates are built from. The radiant currently lies in Cassiopeia.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Chongqing is 19:37, civil twilight ends 20:02, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 21:03. It holds until 04:54, with sunrise at 06:20: 7 h 51 min of real darkness inside 10 h 43 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:58 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 54 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 106.56°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 06:37. Moonset 19:26. At the best hour the limiting magnitude reaches 4.50 — the full value for this city's measured sky.

Why 16 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 56.7° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 4.50, Chongqing converts that ZHR into about 15.9 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.7 at 21:00 (radiant 2.2°) to 12.5 at 05:00 (radiant 56.7°), peaking at 15.9. 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 Chongqing rather than the only one.

Watching from around Chongqing

Chongqing is the 36th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 7.46 million at 289 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Nanchong (145 km NNW), Dazhou (203 km NNE), Zunyi (211 km S) — 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.