Southern delta-Aquariids from Cape Town in 2026

Southern delta-Aquariids from Cape Town: the short answer

From Cape Town, Western Cape (33.9°S, 25 m) the Southern delta-Aquariids maximum of 15:23 on 31 July 2026 is not worth a broken night. The radiant culminates at 72.0° at 02:54, and on the reference rural sky that converts to 4.7 meteors an hour at best.

That ranks it 5th of twelve from Cape Town this year, behind the Geminids (60.7/h) and the Orionids (12.3/h).

The radiant track over this city

Aquarius carries the radiant. From Cape Town it clears the horizon at 20:10 on a bearing of 109° (ESE), reaches 72.0° at 02:54 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 09:38. Within the observing window it peaks at 71.9°.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Cape Town is 18:06, civil twilight ends 18:32, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 19:32. It holds until 06:12, with sunrise at 07:38: 10 h 41 min of real darkness inside 13 h 33 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:52 here rather than at 00:00: Africa/Johannesburg runs 46 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 18.42°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 Cape Town. The Moon is 95% lit and only 2 of 13 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 20:01. Moonset 09:09. At the best hour it stands 37.5° above the horizon, 9° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 5.36.

Why 5 an hour and not 25

Zenithal hourly rate 25, population index 3.2, entry speed 40.6 km/s — fast. Those are stream constants. What changes from city to city is the geometry: at 71.9° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 5.36, Cape Town converts that ZHR into about 4.7 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 19:00 (radiant -13.2°) to 0.0 at 07:00 (radiant 32.3°), peaking at 4.7. That spread across 13 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 Cape Town rather than the only one.

Watching from around Cape Town

Cape Town, Western Cape is the 60th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 4.77 million at 25 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Johannesburg (1262 km NE), Durban (1272 km ENE), Pretoria (1308 km NE) — 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.