Perseids from Xi’an in 2026

Perseids from Xi’an: the short answer

Xi’an, Shaanxi is at 34.3°N and 416 m, which puts the Perseids radiant 66.3° up at culmination (06:30 local time) on the night of maximum, 13 August 2026. Peak activity is 10:00, the reference-sky rate tops out at 82.4 an hour, and 01:00–05:00 is the stretch to be outside.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from Xi’an this year, behind the Geminids (149.8/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant is circumpolar from 34.3°N: it never sets. Over the night it swings between its low point and 66.3° at 06:30, 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

The dark hours here run 21:07 to 04:31 — 7 h 24 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 19:35 and sunrise at 06:03. Civil twilight ends at 20:01; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:49 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 44 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 108.93°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 06:20. Moonset 19:24. At the best hour the limiting magnitude reaches 6.50 — the reference sky's full value.

Why 82 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 61.9° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 6.50, which with r = 2.2 gives 82.4 an hour. Entry speed is 58.8 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 7.2 at 21:00 (radiant 7.3°) to 10.0 at 05:00 (radiant 61.9°), peaking at 82.4. 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 Xi’an rather than the only one.

Watching from around Xi’an

Xi’an, Shaanxi is the 24th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 9.60 million at 416 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Baoji (156 km W), Qingyang (199 km NW), Shiyan (248 km SE) — 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.