Quadrantids from Saint Petersburg in 2026

Quadrantids from Saint Petersburg: the short answer

Saint Petersburg, St.-Petersburg is at 59.9°N and 11 m, which puts the Quadrantids radiant 79.6° up at culmination (09:23 local time) on the night of maximum, 4 January 2026. Peak activity is 00:12, the rate on this city's own measured sky tops out at 8.2 an hour, and 05:00–08:00 is the stretch to be outside.

That ranks it 2nd of twelve from Saint Petersburg this year, behind the Geminids (12.2/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant is circumpolar from 59.9°N: it never sets. Over the night it swings between its low point and 79.6° at 09:23, 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 Saint Petersburg is 16:07, civil twilight ends 17:03, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 18:50. It holds until 07:16, with sunrise at 09:58: 12 h 26 min of real darkness inside 17 h 51 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 01:03 here rather than at 00:00: Europe/Moscow runs 59 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 30.31°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 Saint Petersburg. The Moon is 100% lit and only 0 of 16 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 15:09. Moonset 11:23. At the best hour it stands 26.7° above the horizon, 86° 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 79.1° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 3.11, Saint Petersburg converts that ZHR into about 8.2 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 1.5 at 18:00 (radiant 27.2°) to 0.9 at 09:00 (radiant 79.1°), peaking at 8.2. 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 Saint Petersburg rather than the only one.

Watching from around Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg, St.-Petersburg is the 52nd largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 5.35 million at 11 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Moscow (635 km SE), Stockholm (691 km W), Minsk (692 km SSW) — 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.