Best nights to stargaze — next 7 days
Pick a location and we’ll tell you the best nights to head out over the next week, plus which planets, meteor showers, and satellite passes you’ll actually be able to see.
Where are you watching from?
Tonight at a glance
Best nights — next 7 days
What you can see tonight
Planets above the horizon
Active meteor showers
Bright constellations this season
ISS passes — next 3 days
How the score works
Each night is rated out of 100 based on three things that make or break a stargazing trip: how cloudy it’ll be during full darkness (weighted most), how much moonlight is washing out the sky, and whether any meteor showers are peaking. Anything above 70 is a good night; 85+ is excellent. Get away from city lights if you can.
The Quadrantids are one of the three strongest annual meteor showers worldwide — but they are a Northern Hemisphere event, and from New Zealand they are genuinely difficult to see. The radiant sits almost at the celestial north pole, so from Auckland it barely clears the horizon and from the South Island it never rises at all. Still, a bright fireball can travel far enough across the sky to be seen from New Zealand even when the radiant is below the horizon, and the shower is always worth a check on peak night if the sky is clear.
When to watch the Quadrantids
The Quadrantids peak on the night of 3–4 January each year. Unlike most showers, the peak is extremely sharp — only about six hours wide — so the timing of peak relative to your longitude matters enormously. From New Zealand, peak often falls during daylight hours; the best strategy is to watch on whichever pre-dawn morning is closest to the peak time in UTC.
Where to look from New Zealand
Look low in the north between 3 am and dawn. The radiant, near the top of Boötes, does not rise properly from New Zealand — at best it skims the northern horizon from the upper North Island. Because of this, Quadrantid meteors visible from NZ will all be 'earthgrazers' — long, shallow streaks travelling horizontally across the northern sky rather than falling in from above. These are rare but dramatic when they happen.
How to get the best view
- Accept that this is a tough shower from New Zealand. Expect a handful of meteors at most, not a display.
- The further north you are, the better your chances. Cape Reinga is as good as New Zealand gets for this one.
- Find a site with a dead-flat northern horizon — the ocean, or a north-facing clifftop.
- Go between 3 am and 5 am. The radiant, even though below the horizon, is closest to rising then.
- Any earthgrazer you do catch will be long, slow, and unforgettable — watch the northern sky patiently.
- Dark-adapt properly. Twenty minutes away from screens.
- The January Moon and clear summer weather matter as much as anything else here — the tool above shows the forecast for your exact night.
What causes the Quadrantids
The Quadrantids take their name from a constellation that no longer officially exists — Quadrans Muralis — which used to sit between Boötes and Draco on old star charts. The parent body is asteroid 2003 EH1, which most astronomers now believe is a dormant or dead comet nucleus. The debris stream Earth crosses every January is relatively young — perhaps only 500 years old — which is why the peak is so sharp and so intense in the narrow window where the stream is densest.
The meteors themselves
Quadrantid meteors enter the atmosphere at about 41 kilometres per second. Their Zenithal Hourly Rate at peak can exceed 100, which makes them comparable to the Geminids and Perseids in sheer productivity — but that rate assumes the radiant is directly overhead, which from New Zealand it never is. A Kiwi observer is lucky to see 2 or 3 an hour, almost all of them earthgrazers low in the north.
Forecast for your night
Use the live viewing panel at the top of this page to see whether the sky will be clear where you are. For the full night-by-night cloud, Moon and darkness forecast across every New Zealand region, visit the New Zealand Stargazing Forecast.