Quadrantids from Mexico City in 2026

Quadrantids from Mexico City: the short answer

Marginal from Mexico City. Maximum 15:12 on 3 January 2026; the radiant reaches 60.0° at 09:01 and the rate for this city's measured sky tops out at 4.3 an hour with the Moon 99% lit.

That ranks it 3rd of twelve from Mexico City this year, behind the Geminids (13.4/h) and the Perseids (10.1/h).

The radiant track over this city

Bootes carries the radiant. From Mexico City it clears the horizon at 01:24 on a bearing of 36° (NE), reaches 60.0° at 09:01 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 16:40. Within the observing window it peaks at 43.1°.

When it gets dark here

Mexico City loses the Sun at 18:10 and gets it back at 07:12. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 19:29 to 05:53, 10 h 24 min out of 13 h 1 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:41 here rather than at 00:00: America/Mexico_City runs 37 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 99.13°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 Mexico City. The Moon is 99% lit and only 0 of 12 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 18:42. Moonset 08:26. At the best hour it stands 30.7° above the horizon, 84° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 2.63.

Why 4 an hour and not 110

Converting ZHR 110 into something useful for Mexico City means multiplying by sin(43.1°) and dividing by 2.1 raised to (6.5 − 2.63). That lands at 4.3 meteors an hour, from fast 40.4 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 19:00 (radiant -15.9°) to 4.3 at 06:00 (radiant 43.1°), peaking at 4.3. 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 3 January 2026 is the best night from Mexico City rather than the only one.

Watching from around Mexico City

Mexico City is the 13th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 12.29 million at 2240 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Puebla (105 km ESE), Santiago de Querétaro (184 km NW), León de los Aldama (326 km NW) — 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.