Jupiter at apogee

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Outer Planets feed


Objects: Jupiter

Jupiter orbit around the Sun will carry it to its furthest point from the Earth – its apogee – moving to a distance of 5.97 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 32.3 arcsec in diameter. However, in practice, it will be rather too close to the Sun for observation, at an angular separation of only 1.0132655829042° from it, as it will be close to solar conjunction.

A chart of the path of Jupiter across the sky in 2022 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 23h05m20s 6°54'S Aquarius -2.0 32.3"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 5 Mar 2022

The sky on 5 March 2022
Sunrise
06:11
Sunset
17:38
Twilight ends
19:12
Twilight begins
04:38


Waxing Crescent

14%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:30 10:34 15:39
Venus 03:53 08:53 13:53
Moon 07:54 14:18 20:55
Mars 04:16 08:57 13:38
Jupiter 06:18 11:55 17:33
Saturn 05:15 10:17 15:20
All times shown in EST.

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

18 Oct 2021  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
28 Jul 2022  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
26 Sep 2022  –  Jupiter at opposition
23 Nov 2022  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion

Image credit

© NASA/Cassini

Share