Quadrantids from Moscow in 2026

Quadrantids from Moscow: the short answer

For Moscow, Quadrantids maximum lands at 00:12 on 4 January 2026. Culmination 08:54 at 83.8° — that is 99% of what the same stream would deliver with the radiant overhead — and the ceiling on the rate is 7.3 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 3rd of twelve from Moscow this year, behind the Geminids (12.6/h) and the Perseids (10.5/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant is circumpolar from 55.8°N: it never sets. Over the night it swings between its low point and 83.8° at 08:54, 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

The dark hours here run 18:29 to 06:38 — 12 h 10 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 16:09 and sunrise at 08:58. Civil twilight ends at 16:55; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:34 here rather than at 00:00: Europe/Moscow runs 30 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 37.62°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 Moscow. The Moon is 100% lit and only 0 of 16 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 15:32. Moonset 10:14. At the best hour it stands 30.6° above the horizon, 86° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 2.99.

Why 7 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 79.7° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 2.99, which with r = 2.1 gives 7.3 an hour. Entry speed is 40.4 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.4 at 17:00 (radiant 26.3°) to 1.2 at 08:00 (radiant 79.7°), peaking at 7.3. That spread across 16 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 Moscow rather than the only one.

Watching from around Moscow

Moscow is the 18th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 10.38 million at 155 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Saint Petersburg (635 km NW), Minsk (675 km WSW), Kyiv (755 km SW) — 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.