Perseids from Saint Petersburg in 2026

Perseids from Saint Petersburg: the short answer

Maximum for the Perseids in 2026 is 05:00 Saint Petersburg time on 13 August 2026. From 59.9°N the radiant gets to 88.1° at 06:45, the Moon is 0% lit, and this city's measured-sky ceiling is 5.2 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 3rd of twelve from Saint Petersburg this year, behind the Geminids (12.2/h) and the Quadrantids (8.2/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant is circumpolar from 59.9°N: it never sets. Over the night it swings between its low point and 88.1° at 06:45, bearing S (180°) 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

Saint Petersburg gets no astronomical darkness on this date: sunset 21:00, sunrise 05:08, 8 h 8 min of night, and the Sun never drops the full 18° below the horizon in between. At 59.9°N that is a seasonal fact, not a local one, and it costs you the faintest meteors all night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 01:04 here rather than at 00:00: Europe/Moscow runs 59 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 30.31°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 7 of the 7 sampled dark hours, so moonlight subtracts essentially nothing here. Moonrise 05:48. Moonset 20:59. At the best hour the limiting magnitude reaches 3.10 — the full value for this city's measured sky.

Why 5 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 68.9° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 3.10, which with r = 2.2 gives 5.2 an hour. Entry speed is 58.8 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.4 at 22:00 (radiant 33.9°) to 0.8 at 04:00 (radiant 68.9°), peaking at 5.2. That spread across 7 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 Saint Petersburg rather than the only one.

Watching from around Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg, St.-Petersburg is the 52nd largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 5.35 million at 11 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Moscow (635 km SE), Stockholm (691 km W), Minsk (692 km SSW) — 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.