Southern delta-Aquariids from New York City in 2026

Southern delta-Aquariids from New York City: the short answer

From New York City (40.7°N, 10 m) the Southern delta-Aquariids maximum of 09:23 on 31 July 2026 is not worth a broken night. The radiant culminates at 33.3° at 03:04, and against New York City's own measured sky that converts to 0.2 meteors an hour at best.

That ranks it 12th of twelve from New York City this year, behind the Geminids (13.6/h) and the Perseids (11.9/h).

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 22:02 bearing ESE, culminates 33.3° up at 03:04 towards south (180°), and sets at 08:07. It lies inside Aquarius. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 33.3° buys you 55% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over New York City is 20:13, civil twilight ends 20:44, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 22:04. It holds until 04:00, with sunrise at 05:51: 5 h 56 min of real darkness inside 9 h 38 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 01:02 here rather than at 00:00: America/New_York runs 56 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 74.01°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 New York City. The Moon is 98% lit and only 1 of 9 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 20:57. Moonset 07:45. At the best hour it stands 27.0° above the horizon, 12° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 3.11.

Why 0 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 33.2° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 3.11, New York City converts that ZHR into about 0.2 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 21:00 (radiant -11.3°) to 0.0 at 05:00 (radiant 27.3°), peaking at 0.2. That spread across 9 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 New York City rather than the only one.

Watching from around New York City

New York City is the 29th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 8.80 million at 10 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Philadelphia (130 km SW), Montréal (534 km N), Toronto (555 km NW) — 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.