Perseids from Moscow in 2026

Perseids from Moscow: the short answer

The Perseids reaches maximum at 05:00 local time on 13 August 2026 over Moscow (55.8°N, 37.62°E, 155 m). The radiant culminates 87.8° high at 06:16 and the useful window runs 00:00–03:00, with a ceiling of 10.5 meteors an hour on Moscow's own measured sky.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from Moscow this year, behind the Geminids (12.6/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant is circumpolar from 55.8°N: it never sets. Over the night it swings between its low point and 87.8° at 06:16, 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

Moscow loses the Sun at 20:12 and gets it back at 04:57. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 23:25 to 01:44, 2 h 19 min out of 8 h 45 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:34 here rather than at 00:00: Europe/Moscow runs 30 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 37.62°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 8 of the 8 sampled dark hours, so moonlight subtracts essentially nothing here. Moonrise 05:33. Moonset 20:11. At the best hour the limiting magnitude reaches 4.00 — the full value for this city's measured sky.

Why 11 an hour and not 100

Converting ZHR 100 into something useful for Moscow means multiplying by sin(71.4°) and dividing by 2.2 raised to (6.5 − 4.00). That lands at 10.5 meteors an hour, from fast 58.8 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.3 at 21:00 (radiant 28.4°) to 0.8 at 04:00 (radiant 71.4°), peaking at 10.5. 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 Moscow rather than the only one.

Watching from around Moscow

Moscow is the 18th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 10.38 million at 155 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Saint Petersburg (635 km NW), Minsk (675 km WSW), Kyiv (755 km SW) — 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.