Quadrantids from Seoul in 2026

Quadrantids from Seoul: the short answer

Maximum for the Quadrantids in 2026 is 06:12 Seoul time on 4 January 2026. From 37.6°N the radiant gets to 77.9° at 08:57, the Moon is 100% lit, and the ideal-sky ceiling is 46.6 meteors an hour.

That ranks it 3rd of twelve from Seoul this year, behind the Geminids (148.8/h) and the Perseids (86.3/h).

The radiant track over this city

At 37.6°N a declination-+49.8° radiant traces an arc from 22:35 to 19:20, topping out at 77.9° at 08:57 bearing 360°. Inside the dark window it only manages 65.8°, and that lower figure is the one the rates are built from. The radiant currently lies in Bootes.

When it gets dark here

Seoul loses the Sun at 17:25 and gets it back at 07:47. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 18:59 to 06:13, 11 h 14 min out of 14 h 21 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:36 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Seoul runs 32 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 126.98°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 Seoul. The Moon is 100% lit and only 0 of 14 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 17:00. Moonset 08:38. At the best hour it stands 27.1° above the horizon, 87° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 5.59.

Why 47 an hour and not 110

Converting ZHR 110 into something useful for Seoul means multiplying by sin(65.8°) and dividing by 2.1 raised to (6.5 − 5.59). That lands at 46.6 meteors an hour, from fast 40.4 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.1 at 18:00 (radiant 5.8°) to 2.7 at 07:00 (radiant 65.8°), peaking at 46.6. That spread across 14 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 Seoul rather than the only one.

Watching from around Seoul

Seoul is the 20th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 10.35 million at 38 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Daejeon (140 km SSE), Pyongyang (195 km NNW), Daegu (237 km SE) — 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.