Perseids from Sydney in 2026

Perseids from Sydney: the short answer

Sydney, New South Wales sits at 33.9°S, 151.21°E, and the Perseids radiant never rises here. Maximum falls at 12:00 local time on 13 August 2026, but the radiant's best altitude over the whole 24 hours is -2.0° — still below the horizon. At declination +57.9° it would need a latitude south of about -32° to clear it, and this city is 2.0° short.

The radiant track over this city

Over the full 24 hours of 13 August 2026 the radiant — declination +57.9°, right ascension 47.8°, inside the boundaries of Cassiopeia — swings between -2.0° and well below that, never touching the Sydney horizon. The shower is a northern-hemisphere event and this is a southern-hemisphere city 33.9° from the equator.

When it gets dark here

The dark hours here run 18:48 to 05:11 — 10 h 23 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 17:23 and sunrise at 06:35. Civil twilight ends at 17:49; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight — the true middle of the night — lands within a minute of 00:00 here, because Australia/Sydney happens to sit almost exactly over 151.21°E once the equation of time is taken out. Most cities are not that lucky; the clock and the sky usually disagree by tens of minutes.

What the Moon does here

The Moon is 1% illuminated and below the horizon for 13 of the 13 sampled dark hours, so moonlight subtracts essentially nothing here. Moonrise 07:21. Moonset 17:57. At the best hour the limiting magnitude reaches 0.78 — the full value for this city's measured sky.

Why 0 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 -2.1° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 0.78, which with r = 2.2 gives 0.0 an hour. Entry speed is 58.8 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 18:00 (radiant -65.7°) to 0.0 at 06:00 (radiant -2.1°), peaking at 0.0. That spread across 13 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 Sydney rather than the only one.

Watching from around Sydney

Sydney, New South Wales is the 48th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 5.64 million at 58 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Melbourne (713 km SW), Brisbane (733 km NNE), Adelaide (1162 km W) — 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.