Quadrantids from Istanbul in 2026

Quadrantids from Istanbul: the short answer

Maximum for the Quadrantids in 2026 is 00:12 Istanbul time on 4 January 2026. From 41.0°N the radiant gets to 81.5° at 09:29, the Moon is 100% lit, and this city's measured-sky ceiling is 5.9 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 3rd of twelve from Istanbul this year, behind the Geminids (13.6/h) and the Perseids (11.8/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant is circumpolar from 41.0°N: it never sets. Over the night it swings between its low point and 81.5° at 09:29, bearing N (360°) at culmination. It sits inside Bootes, 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

Istanbul loses the Sun at 17:48 and gets it back at 08:29. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 19:26 to 06:50, 11 h 24 min out of 14 h 41 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 01:08 here rather than at 00:00: Europe/Istanbul runs 64 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 28.95°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 Istanbul. The Moon is 100% lit and only 0 of 13 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 17:40. Moonset 09:34. At the best hour it stands 25.3° above the horizon, 86° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 2.71.

Why 6 an hour and not 110

Converting ZHR 110 into something useful for Istanbul means multiplying by sin(62.7°) and dividing by 2.1 raised to (6.5 − 2.71). That lands at 5.9 meteors an hour, from fast 40.4 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.5 at 19:00 (radiant 6.5°) to 5.9 at 07:00 (radiant 62.7°), peaking at 5.9. 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 4 January 2026 is the best night from Istanbul rather than the only one.

Watching from around Istanbul

Istanbul is the 6th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 15.70 million at 39 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Bursa (91 km S), İzmir (328 km SSW), Ankara (352 km ESE) — 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.