Perseids from Mexico City in 2026

Perseids from Mexico City: the short answer

Mexico City is at 19.4°N and 2240 m, which puts the Perseids radiant 51.4° up at culmination (06:24 local time) on the night of maximum, 12 August 2026. Peak activity is 20:00, the rate on this city's own measured sky tops out at 10.1 an hour, and 02:00–06:00 is the stretch to be outside.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from Mexico City this year, behind the Geminids (13.4/h).

The radiant track over this city

Cassiopeia carries the radiant. From Mexico City it clears the horizon at 22:06 on a bearing of 26° (NNE), reaches 51.4° at 06:24 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 14:40. Within the observing window it peaks at 48.4°.

When it gets dark here

Mexico City loses the Sun at 19:05 and gets it back at 06:17. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 20:23 to 04:59, 8 h 36 min out of 11 h 11 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:41 here rather than at 00:00: America/Mexico_City runs 37 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 99.13°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 10 of the 10 sampled dark hours, so moonlight subtracts essentially nothing here. Moonrise 07:08. Moonset 19:17. At the best hour the limiting magnitude reaches 3.96 — the full value for this city's measured sky.

Why 10 an hour and not 100

Converting ZHR 100 into something useful for Mexico City means multiplying by sin(48.4°) and dividing by 2.2 raised to (6.5 − 3.96). That lands at 10.1 meteors an hour, from fast 58.8 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 20:00 (radiant -10.0°) to 10.1 at 05:00 (radiant 48.4°), peaking at 10.1. 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 12 August 2026 is the best night from Mexico City rather than the only one.

Watching from around Mexico City

Mexico City is the 13th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 12.29 million at 2240 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Puebla (105 km ESE), Santiago de Querétaro (184 km NW), León de los Aldama (326 km NW) — 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.