Quadrantids from Beijing in 2026

Quadrantids from Beijing: the short answer

Maximum for the Quadrantids in 2026 is 05:12 Beijing time on 4 January 2026. From 39.9°N the radiant gets to 80.3° at 08:39, the Moon is 100% lit, and the ideal-sky ceiling is 49.5 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 3rd of twelve from Beijing this year, behind the Geminids (148.4/h) and the Perseids (83.1/h).

The radiant track over this city

At 39.9°N a declination-+49.8° radiant traces an arc from 21:11 to 20:09, topping out at 80.3° at 08:39 bearing 360°. Inside the dark window it only manages 69.9°, and that lower figure is the one the rates are built from. The radiant currently lies in Bootes.

When it gets dark here

Beijing loses the Sun at 17:01 and gets it back at 07:36. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 18:38 to 05:59, 11 h 21 min out of 14 h 35 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:18 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 14 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 116.40°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

Moonlight is the limiting factor on this night from Beijing. The Moon is 100% lit and only 0 of 14 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 16:36. Moonset 08:29. At the best hour it stands 24.7° above the horizon, 87° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 5.61.

Why 50 an hour and not 110

Converting ZHR 110 into something useful for Beijing means multiplying by sin(69.9°) and dividing by 2.1 raised to (6.5 − 5.61). That lands at 49.5 meteors an hour, from fast 40.4 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.6 at 18:00 (radiant 6.4°) to 1.2 at 07:00 (radiant 69.9°), peaking at 49.5. That spread across 14 hours is why a "what time" answer beats a "how many" answer.

The stream comes from Minor planet 2003 EH1 and Comet C/1490 Y1 and is listed as active 28 December to 12 January, so 4 January 2026 is the best night from Beijing rather than the only one.

Watching from around Beijing

Beijing is the 2nd largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 18.96 million at 49 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Tianjin (108 km SE), Baoding (140 km SW), Tangshan (155 km E) — 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.