Quadrantids from Cairo in 2026

Quadrantids from Cairo: the short answer

The Quadrantids reaches maximum at 23:12 local time on 3 January 2026 over Cairo (30.1°N, 31.25°E, 23 m). The radiant culminates 70.5° high at 08:20 and the useful window runs 04:00–06:00, with an ideal-sky ceiling of 36.6 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 3rd of twelve from Cairo this year, behind the Geminids (149.9/h) and the Perseids (77.4/h).

The radiant track over this city

Bootes carries the radiant. From Cairo it clears the horizon at 23:28 on a bearing of 28° (NNE), reaches 70.5° at 08:20 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 17:13. Within the observing window it peaks at 57.2°.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Cairo is 17:07, civil twilight ends 17:33, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 18:32. It holds until 05:26, with sunrise at 06:51: 10 h 54 min of real darkness inside 13 h 44 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:59 here rather than at 00:00: Africa/Cairo runs 5 minutes behind mean solar time at 31.25°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 Cairo. The Moon is 100% lit and only 0 of 13 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 17:08. Moonset 07:51. At the best hour it stands 33.0° above the horizon, 86° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 5.42.

Why 37 an hour and not 110

Zenithal hourly rate 110, population index 2.1, entry speed 40.4 km/s — fast. Those are stream constants. What changes from city to city is the geometry: at 57.2° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 5.42, Cairo converts that ZHR into about 36.6 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 18:00 (radiant -4.3°) to 4.7 at 06:00 (radiant 57.2°), peaking at 36.6. That spread across 13 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 3 January 2026 is the best night from Cairo rather than the only one.

Watching from around Cairo

Cairo is the 23rd largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 9.61 million at 23 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Alexandria (180 km NW), Beirut (585 km NE), Damascus (611 km NE) — 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.