© NASA/Cassini

Jupiter at apogee

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Outer Planets feed

Objects: Jupiter
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The sky at

Jupiter orbit around the Sun will carry it to its furthest point from the Earth – its apogee – moving to a distance of 6.28 AU from us. Since the size and brightness of Jupiter in the night sky both decrease when it is far away from us, this marks the moment when it will appear smallest, measuring a mere 30.7 arcsec in diameter. However, in practice, it will be rather too close to the Sun for observation, at an angular separation of only 1.0304827362148° from it, as it will be close to solar conjunction.

A chart of the path of Jupiter across the sky in 2014 can be found here, and a chart of its rising and setting times here.

The position of Jupiter at the moment it passes apogee will be:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Jupiter 08h17m10s 20°06'N Cancer -1.8 30.7"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 28 Mar 2024

The sky on 28 March 2024
Sunrise
06:39
Sunset
19:05
Twilight ends
20:29
Twilight begins
05:15

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

83%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:16 13:52 20:29
Venus 05:59 11:49 17:39
Moon 21:33 02:59 08:18
Mars 05:14 10:48 16:21
Jupiter 08:32 15:17 22:02
Saturn 05:40 11:21 17:02
All times shown in PDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.

Related news

06 Mar 2014  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
08 Dec 2014  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
06 Feb 2015  –  Jupiter at opposition
08 Apr 2015  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion

Image credit

© NASA/Cassini

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