Southern delta-Aquariids from Taipei in 2026

Southern delta-Aquariids from Taipei: the short answer

Marginal from Taipei, Taiwan. Maximum 21:23 on 31 July 2026; the radiant reaches 49.0° at 02:02 and the ideal-sky rate tops out at 3.4 an hour with the Moon 96% lit.

That ranks it 12th of twelve from Taipei this year, behind the Geminids (148.8/h) and the Perseids (79.4/h).

The radiant track over this city

Aquarius carries the radiant. From Taipei it clears the horizon at 20:33 on a bearing of 108° (ESE), reaches 49.0° at 02:02 in the south, and drops back below the horizon at 07:31. Within the observing window it peaks at 49.0°.

When it gets dark here

Taipei loses the Sun at 18:39 and gets it back at 05:21. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 20:03 to 03:57, 7 h 54 min out of 10 h 42 min of night.

Local solar midnight — the true middle of the night — lands within a minute of 00:00 here, because Asia/Taipei happens to sit almost exactly over 121.53°E once the equation of time is taken out. Most cities are not that lucky; the clock and the sky usually disagree by tens of minutes.

What the Moon does here

Moonlight is the limiting factor on this night from Taipei. The Moon is 96% lit and only 0 of 9 sampled hours are moon-free. Moonrise 19:47. Moonset 07:28. At the best hour it stands 49.1° above the horizon, 8° from the radiant, pulling the limiting magnitude down to 5.06.

Why 3 an hour and not 25

Converting ZHR 25 into something useful for Taipei means multiplying by sin(49.0°) and dividing by 3.2 raised to (6.5 − 5.06). That lands at 3.4 meteors an hour, from fast 40.6 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 20:00 (radiant -7.2°) to 2.9 at 04:00 (radiant 40.0°), peaking at 3.4. 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 Taipei rather than the only one.

Watching from around Taipei

Taipei, Taiwan is the 33rd largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 7.87 million at 5 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Taichung (132 km SW), Fuzhou (249 km WNW), Putian (257 km W) — 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.