Southern delta-Aquariids from Moscow in 2026

Southern delta-Aquariids from Moscow: the short answer

The Southern delta-Aquariids peaks at 16:23 local time on 31 July 2026 over Moscow. Culmination is 02:37 at 18.4° — 31% of the rate a zenith radiant would give — so the ceiling here is 0.9 an hour, not worth the sleep.

That ranks it 11th of twelve from Moscow this year, behind the Geminids (137.0/h) and the Perseids (75.7/h).

The radiant track over this city

Aquarius carries the radiant. From Moscow it clears the horizon at 22:16 on a bearing of 119° (ESE), reaches 18.4° at 02:37 in the south, and drops back below the horizon at 06:58. Within the observing window it peaks at 18.2°.

When it gets dark here

Moscow gets no astronomical darkness on this date: sunset 20:37, sunrise 04:34, 7 h 57 min of night, and the Sun never drops the full 18° below the horizon in between. At 55.8°N that is a seasonal fact, not a local one, and it costs you the faintest meteors all night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:36 here rather than at 00:00: Europe/Moscow runs 30 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 37.62°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 Moscow. The Moon is 95% lit and only 0 of 6 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 21:13. Moonset 07:44. At the best hour it stands 22.2° above the horizon, 7° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 4.82.

Why 1 an hour and not 25

The published ZHR of 25 assumes the radiant overhead and a sky at limiting magnitude 6.5. Here the radiant reaches 18.2° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 4.82, which with r = 3.2 gives 0.9 an hour. Entry speed is 40.6 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 22:00 (radiant -2.1°) to 0.0 at 03:00 (radiant 18.2°), peaking at 0.9. That spread across 6 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 Moscow rather than the only one.

Watching from around Moscow

Moscow is the 18th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 10.38 million at 155 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Saint Petersburg (635 km NW), Minsk (675 km WSW), Kyiv (755 km SW) — 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.