Perseids from New York City in 2026

Perseids from New York City: the short answer

New York City is at 40.7°N and 10 m, which puts the Perseids radiant 72.7° up at culmination (06:43 local time) on the night of maximum, 12 August 2026. Peak activity is 22:00, the reference-sky rate tops out at 85.7 an hour, and 01:00–05:00 is the stretch to be outside.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from New York City this year, behind the Geminids (148.4/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant is circumpolar from 40.7°N: it never sets. Over the night it swings between its low point and 72.7° at 06:43, 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

Sunset over New York City is 19:57, civil twilight ends 20:27, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 21:42. It holds until 04:20, with sunrise at 06:04: 6 h 38 min of real darkness inside 10 h 7 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 01:01 here rather than at 00:00: America/New_York runs 56 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 74.01°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 9 of the 9 sampled dark hours, so moonlight subtracts essentially nothing here. Moonrise 06:59. Moonset 20:04. At the best hour the limiting magnitude reaches 6.50 — the reference sky's full value.

Why 86 an hour and not 100

Zenithal hourly rate 100, population index 2.2, entry speed 58.8 km/s — fast. Those are stream constants. What changes from city to city is the geometry: at 66.1° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 6.50, New York City converts that ZHR into about 85.7 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 1.3 at 21:00 (radiant 12.8°) to 6.5 at 05:00 (radiant 66.1°), peaking at 85.7. That spread across 9 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 New York City rather than the only one.

Watching from around New York City

New York City is the 29th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 8.80 million at 10 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Philadelphia (130 km SW), Montréal (534 km N), Toronto (555 km NW) — 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.