Southern delta-Aquariids from Bangkok in 2026

Southern delta-Aquariids from Bangkok: the short answer

Marginal from Bangkok. Maximum 20:23 on 31 July 2026; the radiant reaches 60.3° at 02:26 and the rate for this city's measured sky tops out at 0.2 an hour with the Moon 96% lit.

That ranks it 11th of twelve from Bangkok this year, behind the Geminids (13.0/h) and the Perseids (9.0/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 20:42 bearing ESE, culminates 60.3° up at 02:26 towards south (180°), and sets at 08:10. It lies inside Aquarius. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 60.3° buys you 87% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

Bangkok loses the Sun at 18:46 and gets it back at 06:02. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 20:02 to 04:46, 8 h 44 min out of 11 h 16 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:24 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Bangkok runs 18 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 100.50°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 Bangkok. The Moon is 96% lit and only 1 of 10 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 20:02. Moonset 08:03. At the best hour it stands 26.0° above the horizon, 8° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 3.16.

Why 0 an hour and not 25

Converting ZHR 25 into something useful for Bangkok means multiplying by sin(59.6°) and dividing by 3.2 raised to (6.5 − 3.16). That lands at 0.2 meteors an hour, from fast 40.6 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 20:00 (radiant -9.9°) to 0.1 at 05:00 (radiant 41.8°), peaking at 0.2. That spread across 10 hours is why a "what time" answer beats a "how many" answer.

The stream comes from Comet 96P/Machholz and is listed as active 12 July to 23 August, so 31 July 2026 is the best night from Bangkok rather than the only one.

Watching from around Bangkok

Bangkok is the 55th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 5.10 million at 12 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Phnom Penh (537 km ESE), Yangon (576 km NW), Cần Thơ (708 km SE) — 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.