© NASA/Cassini

Jupiter at perigee

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Outer Planets feed

Objects: Jupiter
Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

Jupiter's orbit around the Sun will carry it to its closest point to the Earth – its perigee – passing within 3.95 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 48.8 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 19:25 and 06:09. It will become accessible at around 19:25, when it rises to an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. It will reach its highest point in the sky at 00:47, 57° above your southern horizon. It will become inaccessible at around 06:09 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 2022 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 00h15m20s 0°06'S Pisces -2.9 48.8"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 25 Sep 2022

The sky on 25 September 2022
Sunrise
06:36
Sunset
18:41
Twilight ends
20:03
Twilight begins
05:14

29-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

0%

29 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:16 12:17 18:17
Venus 06:04 12:15 18:26
Moon 06:22 12:40 18:50
Mars 22:35 05:38 12:42
Jupiter 18:45 00:47 06:50
Saturn 16:36 21:55 03:14
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

28 Jul 2022  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
26 Sep 2022  –  Jupiter at opposition
23 Nov 2022  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
04 Sep 2023  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion

Image credit

© NASA/Cassini

Share

San Diego

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

32.72°N
117.16°W
PST

Color scheme