Perseids from Kano in 2026

Perseids from Kano: the short answer

The Perseids reaches maximum at 03:00 local time on 13 August 2026 over Kano (12.0°N, 8.52°E, 484 m). The radiant culminates 44.0° high at 06:12 and the useful window runs 02:00–06:00, with a ceiling of 45.1 meteors an hour on Kano's own measured sky.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from Kano this year, behind the Geminids (86.7/h).

The radiant track over this city

At 12.0°N a declination-+57.9° radiant traces an arc from 22:53 to 13:31, topping out at 44.0° at 06:12 bearing 0°. Inside the dark window it only manages 42.0°, and that lower figure is the one the rates are built from. The radiant currently lies in Cassiopeia.

When it gets dark here

The dark hours here run 20:00 to 05:01 — 9 hours of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 18:47 and sunrise at 06:14. Civil twilight ends at 19:09; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:30 here rather than at 00:00: Africa/Lagos runs 26 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 8.52°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 06:47. Moonset 18:45. At the best hour the limiting magnitude reaches 6.00 — the full value for this city's measured sky.

Why 45 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 42.0° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 6.00, which with r = 2.2 gives 45.1 an hour. Entry speed is 58.8 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 20:00 (radiant -16.7°) to 45.1 at 05:00 (radiant 42.0°), peaking at 45.1. 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 Kano rather than the only one.

Watching from around Kano

Kano is the 58th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 4.91 million at 484 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Kaduna (202 km SW), Abuja (346 km SSW), Onitsha (678 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.