Perseids from Hong Kong in 2026

Perseids from Hong Kong: the short answer

Maximum for the Perseids in 2026 is 10:00 Hong Kong time on 13 August 2026. From 22.3°N the radiant gets to 54.3° at 06:09, the Moon is 0% lit, and the ideal-sky ceiling is 73.6 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from Hong Kong this year, behind the Geminids (147.0/h).

The radiant track over this city

Cassiopeia carries the radiant. From Hong Kong it clears the horizon at 21:26 on a bearing of 24° (NNE), reaches 54.3° at 06:09 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 14:51. Within the observing window it peaks at 52.2°.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Hong Kong is 18:57, civil twilight ends 19:20, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 20:16. It holds until 04:40, with sunrise at 05:59: 8 h 24 min of real darkness inside 11 h 3 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:28 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Hong_Kong runs 23 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 114.17°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 06:15. Moonset 18:43. At the best hour the limiting magnitude reaches 6.50 — the reference sky's full value.

Why 74 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 52.2° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 6.50, Hong Kong converts that ZHR into about 73.6 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 20:00 (radiant -6.6°) to 13.5 at 05:00 (radiant 52.2°), peaking at 73.6. 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 Hong Kong rather than the only one.

Watching from around Hong Kong

Hong Kong is the 37th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 7.40 million at 60 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Shenzhen (32 km NNW), Zhongshan (86 km WNW), Dongguan (93 km NNW) — 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.