Quadrantids from Delhi in 2026

Quadrantids from Delhi: the short answer

Delhi is at 28.7°N and 227 m, which puts the Quadrantids radiant 69.1° up at culmination (08:46 local time) on the night of maximum, 4 January 2026. Peak activity is 02:42, the rate on this city's own measured sky tops out at 5.1 an hour, and 04:00–07:00 is the stretch to be outside.

That ranks it 3rd of twelve from Delhi this year, behind the Geminids (13.7/h) and the Perseids (11.2/h).

The radiant track over this city

At 28.7°N a declination-+49.8° radiant traces an arc from 00:05 to 17:27, topping out at 69.1° at 08:46 bearing 360°. Inside the dark window it only manages 52.2°, and that lower figure is the one the rates are built from. The radiant currently lies in Bootes.

When it gets dark here

The dark hours here run 19:00 to 05:50 — 10 h 50 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 17:36 and sunrise at 07:14. Civil twilight ends at 18:02; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:25 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Kolkata runs 21 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 77.23°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 Delhi. The Moon is 100% lit and only 0 of 12 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 17:29. Moonset 08:07. At the best hour it stands 24.2° above the horizon, 87° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 2.67.

Why 5 an hour and not 110

The published ZHR of 110 assumes the radiant overhead and a sky at limiting magnitude 6.5. Here the radiant reaches 52.2° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 2.67, which with r = 2.1 gives 5.1 an hour. Entry speed is 40.4 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 19:00 (radiant -8.0°) to 5.1 at 06:00 (radiant 52.2°), peaking at 5.1. That spread across 12 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 Delhi rather than the only one.

Watching from around Delhi

Delhi is the 16th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 11.03 million at 227 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Jaipur (239 km SW), Ludhiana (284 km NNW), Kanpur (392 km SE) — 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.