Quadrantids from London in 2026

Quadrantids from London: the short answer

London, England is at 51.5°N and 25 m, which puts the Quadrantids radiant 88.0° up at culmination (08:25 local time) on the night of maximum, 3 January 2026. Peak activity is 21:12, the rate on this city's own measured sky tops out at 8.2 an hour, and 05:00–07:00 is the stretch to be outside.

That ranks it 3rd of twelve from London this year, behind the Geminids (13.0/h) and the Perseids (11.8/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant is circumpolar from 51.5°N: it never sets. Over the night it swings between its low point and 88.0° at 08:25, bearing S (180°) 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

Sunset over London is 16:04, civil twilight ends 16:44, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 18:07. It holds until 06:02, with sunrise at 08:05: 11 h 55 min of real darkness inside 16 h 1 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:05 here rather than at 00:00: Europe/London runs 1 minute ahead of mean solar time at 0.13°W. 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 London. The Moon is 99% lit and only 0 of 15 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 15:47. Moonset 09:20. At the best hour it stands 26.8° above the horizon, 85° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 3.11.

Why 8 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 76.3° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 3.11, London converts that ZHR into about 8.2 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.5 at 17:00 (radiant 20.3°) to 1.8 at 07:00 (radiant 76.3°), peaking at 8.2. That spread across 15 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 London rather than the only one.

Watching from around London

London, England is the 28th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 8.96 million at 25 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Paris (344 km SSE), Hamburg (720 km ENE), Munich (918 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.