Jupiter's orbit around the Sun will carry it to its closest point to the Earth – its perigee – passing within 4.23 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 45.6 arcsec at closest approach, and a maximum brightness of magnitude -2.7 .

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 Cambridge , it will be visible between 17:12 and 06:30. It will become accessible at around 17:12, when it rises to an altitude of 7° above your north-eastern horizon. It will reach its highest point in the sky at 23:51, 69° above your southern horizon. It will become inaccessible at around 06:30 when it sinks below 7° above your north-western horizon.

A chart of the path of Jupiter across the sky in 2026 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:

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 9 Jan 2026

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.

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Image credit

© NASA/Cassini

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