Perseids from Karachi in 2026

Worth planning for

Perseids: worth planning for, cloud permitting

Plan for 02:00–05:00 local time: the radiant reaches 54° above the horizon, the Moon is only 0% lit and out of the way, and astronomical darkness lasts 8 h 13 min. Under the sky measured here that rates about 16 meteors an hour — cloud cover is a runtime fact this page cannot know, so treat it as the ceiling, not a promise.

Maximum (local)
07:00 · 13 August 2026
Night of
12 August 2026
Best window
02:00–05:00
Peak rate
15.5/h
Radiant (best)
54.1° NNE
Moon
0% lit
Cloud cover
unavailable

Local to Karachi

Sunset
19:09
Astronomical dusk
20:30
Astronomical dawn
04:43
Sunrise
06:05
Dark hours
8 h 13 min
Radiant culminates
06:18 · 56.9°
Solar midnight
00:36
Latitude
24.9°N

Rates are computed for Karachi's own measured sky brightness, 17.9 mag/arcsec² — equivalent to Bortle 8 skies. Derived from satellite night-lights data; the method is published.

Perseids from Karachi: the short answer

Maximum for the Perseids in 2026 is 07:00 Karachi time on 13 August 2026. From 24.9°N the radiant gets to 56.9° at 06:18, the Moon is 0% lit, and this city's measured-sky ceiling is 15.5 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from Karachi this year, behind the Geminids (21.9/h).

The radiant track over this city

Cassiopeia carries the radiant. From Karachi it clears the horizon at 21:07 on a bearing of 21° (NNE), reaches 56.9° at 06:18 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 15:27. Within the observing window it peaks at 54.1°.

When it gets dark here

Karachi loses the Sun at 19:09 and gets it back at 06:05. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 20:30 to 04:43, 8 h 13 min out of 10 h 56 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:36 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Karachi runs 32 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 67.01°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 06:29. Moonset 19:01. 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

Converting ZHR 100 into something useful for Karachi means multiplying by sin(54.1°) and dividing by 2.2 raised to (6.5 − 4.50). That lands at 15.5 meteors an hour, from fast 58.8 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 20:00 (radiant -4.5°) to 6.3 at 05:00 (radiant 54.1°), peaking at 15.5. 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 Karachi rather than the only one.

Watching from around Karachi

Karachi, Sindh is the 14th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 11.62 million at 8 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Hyderabad (150 km ENE), Quetta (592 km N), Ahmedabad (602 km ESE) — 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.

Expected rate through the night

0 10 20 20:00 22:00 00:00 02:00 04:00

Meteors per hour for one observer under this city's measured sky. Local time, Asia/Karachi. Cloud cover is not included — it is unknown at build time.

Hour by hour from Karachi

Hourly radiant altitude, Moon position, limiting magnitude and expected rate for Perseids from Karachi.
Local Radiant Moon alt Moon lit Sun alt Cloud Lim. mag Meteors/h
20:00 -4.5° -12.9° 0% -11.7° n/a 2.15 0.0
21:00 -0.6° -24.5° 0% -23.9° n/a 4.50 0.0
22:00 4.7° -35.0° 0% -34.9° n/a 4.50 1.7
23:00 11.2° -43.6° 0% -43.8° n/a 4.50 4.0
00:00 18.5° -49.2° 0% -49.3° n/a 4.50 6.6
01:00 26.3° -50.5° 0% -50.0° n/a 4.50 9.2
02:00 34.2° -47.0° 0% -45.5° n/a 4.50 11.6
03:00 41.9° -39.8° 0% -37.2° n/a 4.50 13.8
04:00 48.8° -30.1° 0% -26.6° n/a 4.50 15.5
05:00 54.1° -19.0° 0% -14.7° n/a 3.25 6.3

"Cloud: n/a" means the forecast is not resolved on this prerendered page, not that the sky is clear.