© 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 6.16 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 31.3 arcsec in diameter. However, in practice, it will be rather too close to the Sun for observation, at an angular separation of only 1.4861309926668° from it, as it will be close to solar conjunction.

A chart of the path of Jupiter across the sky in 2025 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 06h15m00s 23°15'N Gemini -1.9 31.3"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 26 Jun 2025

The sky on 26 June 2025
Sunrise
05:19
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
03:10

1-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

3%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:16 14:40 22:03
Venus 02:51 09:50 16:49
Moon 06:16 14:13 22:00
Mars 10:19 17:00 23:41
Jupiter 05:16 12:47 20:19
Saturn 00:44 06:42 12:40
All times shown in EDT.

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

04 Feb 2025  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
11 Nov 2025  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
10 Jan 2026  –  Jupiter at opposition
10 Mar 2026  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion

Image credit

© NASA/Cassini

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41.14°N
73.26°W
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