Quadrantids from Santiago in 2026

Quadrantids from Santiago: the short answer

Santiago is at 33.5°S and 556 m, which puts the Quadrantids radiant 7.1° up at culmination (10:08 local time) on the night of maximum, 3 January 2026. Peak activity is 18:12, the reference-sky rate tops out at 0.0 an hour.

That ranks it 11th of twelve from Santiago this year, behind the Geminids (61.4/h) and the Orionids (12.5/h).

The radiant track over this city

Bootes carries the radiant. From Santiago it clears the horizon at 07:30 on a bearing of 24° (NNE), reaches 7.1° at 10:08 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 12:42. Within the observing window it peaks at -9.5°.

When it gets dark here

The dark hours here run 22:38 to 04:56 — 6 h 18 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 20:56 and sunrise at 06:38. Civil twilight ends at 21:24; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 01:47 here rather than at 00:00: America/Santiago runs 103 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 70.65°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 Santiago. The Moon is 99% lit and only 0 of 9 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 21:40. Moonset 07:41. At the best hour it stands 2.6° above the horizon, 85° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 3.21.

Why 0 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 -9.5° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 3.21, which with r = 2.1 gives 0.0 an hour. Entry speed is 40.4 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 22:00 (radiant -73.8°) to 0.0 at 06:00 (radiant -9.5°), peaking at 0.0. That spread across 9 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 Santiago rather than the only one.

Watching from around Santiago

Santiago is the 59th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 4.84 million at 556 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Córdoba (648 km ENE), Buenos Aires (1137 km E), Asunción (1551 km ENE) — close enough that the radiant altitudes barely change, far enough that sunset and moonrise do.

What this page does not know

Light-pollution data for this location is not connected yet. Rates on this page are computed against the reference rural sky the zenithal hourly rate is defined for (naked-eye limiting magnitude 6.5); they are not a claim about how bright the sky is where you are standing. Once the light-pollution layer is connected these figures will be recomputed for the local sky and will generally fall.

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.