© NASA/Cassini

Jupiter at perigee

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Outer Planets feed

Objects: Jupiter
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The sky at

Jupiter's orbit around the Sun will carry it to its closest point to the Earth – its perigee – passing within 3.97 AU of us.

Jupiter reaches perigee at around the time when it passes the Earth in its orbit. At this time, the Sun, Earth and Jupiter lie in a straight line, with the Earth in the middle.

Consequently, Jupiter appears almost exactly opposite the Sun in the sky – a configuration called opposition, when Jupiter reaches its highest point in the sky at midnight and is visible for much of the night.

Every perigee of Jupiter is associated with a near-simultaneous opposition.

On this occasion, Jupiter will attain a maximum angular diameter of 48.5 arcsec at closest approach, and a maximum brightness of magnitude -2.9 .

Observing Jupiter

Even at its closest approach to the Earth, it is never possible to distinguish Jupiter as more than a star-like point of light with the naked eye, though a simple pair of binoculars is sufficient to reveal it as a disk of light.

From San Diego , it will be visible between 19:45 and 05:56. It will become accessible at around 19:45, when it rises to an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. It will reach its highest point in the sky at 00:50, 51° above your southern horizon. It will become inaccessible at around 05:56 when it sinks below 7° above your western horizon.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

A chart of the path of Jupiter across the sky in 1986 can be found here, and a chart of its rising and setting times here.

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

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Jupiter 23h18m30s 6°05'S Aquarius -2.9 48.5"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 29 Mar 2024

The sky on 29 March 2024
Sunrise
06:37
Sunset
19:06
Twilight ends
20:29
Twilight begins
05:14

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

81%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:13 13:50 20:27
Venus 05:59 11:50 17:40
Moon 22:33 03:45 08:52
Mars 05:12 10:47 16:21
Jupiter 08:29 15:14 22:00
Saturn 05:36 11:18 16:59
All times shown in PDT.

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

12 Jul 1986  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
10 Sep 1986  –  Jupiter at opposition
08 Nov 1986  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
19 Aug 1987  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion

Image credit

© NASA/Cassini

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