Perseids from Nanjing in 2026

Perseids from Nanjing: the short answer

Maximum for the Perseids in 2026 is 10:00 Nanjing time on 13 August 2026. From 32.1°N the radiant gets to 64.1° at 05:51, the Moon is 0% lit, and this city's measured-sky ceiling is 16.2 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from Nanjing this year, behind the Geminids (22.2/h).

The radiant track over this city

Cassiopeia carries the radiant. From Nanjing it clears the horizon at 18:09 on a bearing of 2° (N), reaches 64.1° at 05:51 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 17:31. Within the observing window it peaks at 62.7°.

When it gets dark here

Nanjing loses the Sun at 18:52 and gets it back at 05:27. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 20:21 to 03:58, 7 h 37 min out of 10 h 35 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:10 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 5 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 118.78°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 05:42. Moonset 18:40. At the best hour the limiting magnitude reaches 4.40 — the full value for this city's measured sky.

Why 16 an hour and not 100

Converting ZHR 100 into something useful for Nanjing means multiplying by sin(62.7°) and dividing by 2.2 raised to (6.5 − 4.40). That lands at 16.2 meteors an hour, from fast 58.8 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.4 at 20:00 (radiant 3.9°) to 0.6 at 05:00 (radiant 62.7°), peaking at 16.2. 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 Nanjing rather than the only one.

Watching from around Nanjing

Nanjing, Jiangsu is the 26th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 9.31 million at 22 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Wuhu (85 km SSW), Changzhou (116 km ESE), Taizhou (116 km ENE) — 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.