Perseids from Shanghai in 2026

Perseids from Shanghai: the short answer

Maximum for the Perseids in 2026 is 10:00 Shanghai time on 13 August 2026. From 31.2°N the radiant gets to 63.3° at 05:40, the Moon is 0% lit, and the ideal-sky ceiling is 78.6 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from Shanghai this year, behind the Geminids (150.0/h).

The radiant track over this city

Cassiopeia carries the radiant. From Shanghai it clears the horizon at 18:41 on a bearing of 8° (N), reaches 63.3° at 05:40 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 16:38. Within the observing window it peaks at 58.2°.

When it gets dark here

Shanghai loses the Sun at 18:40 and gets it back at 05:18. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 20:08 to 03:50, 7 h 42 min out of 10 h 38 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:59 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 6 minutes behind mean solar time at 121.46°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 9 of the 9 sampled dark hours, so moonlight subtracts essentially nothing here. Moonrise 05:32. Moonset 18:27. At the best hour the limiting magnitude reaches 6.50 — the reference sky's full value.

Why 79 an hour and not 100

Converting ZHR 100 into something useful for Shanghai means multiplying by sin(58.2°) and dividing by 2.2 raised to (6.5 − 6.50). That lands at 78.6 meteors an hour, from fast 58.8 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 3.4 at 20:00 (radiant 3.8°) to 39.1 at 04:00 (radiant 58.2°), peaking at 78.6. 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 13 August 2026 is the best night from Shanghai rather than the only one.

Watching from around Shanghai

Shanghai is the 1st largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 24.87 million at 12 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Suzhou (83 km W), Nantong (105 km NNW), Ningbo (150 km S) — 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.