Perseids from Delhi in 2026

Perseids from Delhi: the short answer

The Perseids reaches maximum at 07:30 local time on 13 August 2026 over Delhi (28.7°N, 77.23°E, 227 m). The radiant culminates 60.7° high at 06:07 and the useful window runs 01:00–05:00, with an ideal-sky ceiling of 80.2 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from Delhi this year, behind the Geminids (149.1/h).

The radiant track over this city

At 28.7°N a declination-+57.9° radiant traces an arc from 20:05 to 16:08, topping out at 60.7° at 06:07 bearing 0°. Inside the dark window it only manages 58.4°, 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 Delhi is 19:03, civil twilight ends 19:28, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 20:28. It holds until 04:23, with sunrise at 05:49: 7 h 55 min of real darkness inside 10 h 46 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:26 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Kolkata runs 21 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 77.23°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 06:11. Moonset 18:55. At the best hour the limiting magnitude reaches 6.50 — the reference sky's full value.

Why 80 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 58.4° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 6.50, Delhi converts that ZHR into about 80.2 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 20:00 (radiant -0.3°) to 4.1 at 05:00 (radiant 58.4°), peaking at 80.2. 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 Delhi rather than the only one.

Watching from around Delhi

Delhi is the 16th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 11.03 million at 227 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Jaipur (239 km SW), Ludhiana (284 km NNW), Kanpur (392 km SE) — close enough that the radiant altitudes barely change, far enough that sunset and moonrise do.

What this page does not know

Light-pollution data for this location is not connected yet. Rates on this page are computed against the reference rural sky the zenithal hourly rate is defined for (naked-eye limiting magnitude 6.5); they are not a claim about how bright the sky is where you are standing. Once the light-pollution layer is connected these figures will be recomputed for the local sky and will generally fall.

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.