Quadrantids from Nanjing in 2026

Quadrantids from Nanjing: the short answer

The Quadrantids reaches maximum at 05:12 local time on 4 January 2026 over Nanjing, Jiangsu (32.1°N, 118.78°E, 22 m). The radiant culminates 72.4° high at 08:30 and the useful window runs 04:00–06:00, with a ceiling of 8.3 meteors an hour on Nanjing's own measured sky.

That ranks it 3rd of twelve from Nanjing this year, behind the Geminids (22.2/h) and the Perseids (16.2/h).

The radiant track over this city

Bootes carries the radiant. From Nanjing it clears the horizon at 23:19 on a bearing of 26° (NNE), reaches 72.4° at 08:30 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 17:42. Within the observing window it peaks at 57.1°.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Nanjing is 17:12, civil twilight ends 17:39, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 18:39. It holds until 05:39, with sunrise at 07:06: 10 h 59 min of real darkness inside 13 h 53 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:09 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 5 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 118.78°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 Nanjing. The Moon is 100% lit and only 0 of 13 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 16:54. Moonset 07:55. At the best hour it stands 32.6° above the horizon, 87° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 3.43.

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 57.1° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 3.43, Nanjing converts that ZHR into about 8.3 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 18:00 (radiant -1.5°) to 4.6 at 06:00 (radiant 57.1°), peaking at 8.3. 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 Nanjing rather than the only one.

Watching from around Nanjing

Nanjing, Jiangsu is the 26th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 9.31 million at 22 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Wuhu (85 km SSW), Changzhou (116 km ESE), Taizhou (116 km ENE) — 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.