Quadrantids from New York City in 2026

Quadrantids from New York City: the short answer

Maximum for the Quadrantids in 2026 is 16:12 New York City time on 3 January 2026. From 40.7°N the radiant gets to 81.3° at 08:21, the Moon is 99% lit, and this city's measured-sky ceiling is 5.8 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 3rd of twelve from New York City this year, behind the Geminids (13.6/h) and the Perseids (11.9/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant is circumpolar from 40.7°N: it never sets. Over the night it swings between its low point and 81.3° at 08:21, 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

New York City loses the Sun at 16:41 and gets it back at 07:20. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 18:19 to 05:42, 11 h 23 min out of 14 h 39 min of night.

Local solar midnight — the true middle of the night — lands within a minute of 00:00 here, because America/New_York happens to sit almost exactly over 74.01°W once the equation of time is taken out. Most cities are not that lucky; the clock and the sky usually disagree by tens of minutes.

What the Moon does here

Moonlight is the limiting factor on this night from New York City. The Moon is 99% lit and only 0 of 13 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 16:55. Moonset 08:37. At the best hour it stands 37.3° above the horizon, 85° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 2.81.

Why 6 an hour and not 110

Converting ZHR 110 into something useful for New York City means multiplying by sin(63.9°) and dividing by 2.1 raised to (6.5 − 2.81). That lands at 5.8 meteors an hour, from fast 40.4 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.6 at 18:00 (radiant 5.6°) to 4.3 at 06:00 (radiant 63.9°), peaking at 5.8. 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 3 January 2026 is the best night from New York City rather than the only one.

Watching from around New York City

New York City is the 29th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 8.80 million at 10 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Philadelphia (130 km SW), Montréal (534 km N), Toronto (555 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.