Perseids from Harbin in 2026

Perseids from Harbin: the short answer

For Harbin, Heilongjiang, Perseids maximum lands at 10:00 on 13 August 2026. Culmination 05:19 at 77.8° — that is 98% of what the same stream would deliver with the radiant overhead — and the ceiling on the rate is 11.8 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from Harbin this year, behind the Geminids (13.3/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant is circumpolar from 45.8°N: it never sets. Over the night it swings between its low point and 77.8° at 05:19, bearing N (0°) at culmination. It sits inside Cassiopeia, and because it is above the horizon for every dark hour, what limits you here is darkness and moonlight, not geometry.

When it gets dark here

The dark hours here run 20:46 to 02:31 — 5 h 45 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 18:46 and sunrise at 04:30. Civil twilight ends at 19:19; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:38 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 27 minutes behind mean solar time at 126.65°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 8 of the 8 sampled dark hours, so moonlight subtracts essentially nothing here. Moonrise 04:43. Moonset 18:38. At the best hour the limiting magnitude reaches 4.00 — the full value for this city's measured sky.

Why 12 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 65.6° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 4.00, which with r = 2.2 gives 11.8 an hour. Entry speed is 58.8 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.9 at 20:00 (radiant 18.8°) to 4.8 at 03:00 (radiant 65.6°), peaking at 11.8. That spread across 8 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 Harbin rather than the only one.

Watching from around Harbin

Harbin, Heilongjiang is the 54th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 5.24 million at 140 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Daqing (157 km NW), Jilin (212 km S), Changchun (233 km SSW) — 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.