Perseids from London in 2026

Perseids from London: the short answer

Maximum for the Perseids in 2026 is 03:00 London time on 13 August 2026. From 51.5°N the radiant gets to 83.5° at 06:47, the Moon is 0% lit, and the ideal-sky ceiling is 84.4 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from London this year, behind the Geminids (141.5/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant is circumpolar from 51.5°N: it never sets. Over the night it swings between its low point and 83.5° at 06:47, 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 22:55 to 03:15 — 4 h 20 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 20:28 and sunrise at 05:42. Civil twilight ends at 21:06; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 01:05 here rather than at 00:00: Europe/London runs 61 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 0.13°W. 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 06:26. Moonset 20:29. At the best hour the limiting magnitude reaches 6.50 — the reference sky's full value.

Why 84 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 73.3° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 6.50, which with r = 2.2 gives 84.4 an hour. Entry speed is 58.8 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 4.2 at 22:00 (radiant 26.3°) to 0.7 at 05:00 (radiant 73.3°), peaking at 84.4. 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 London rather than the only one.

Watching from around London

London, England is the 28th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 8.96 million at 25 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Paris (344 km SSE), Hamburg (720 km ENE), Munich (918 km ESE) — 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.