Although Jupiter is on average the third brightest object in the night sky after the Moon and Venus, the gas giant could be hard to identify among the many bright stars and constellations on a typical night.
Yet tonight, Jupiter can be seen just below the moon, at an angle of about five degrees. This position results from Jupiter’s movement around the sun in relation to the Earth.
Jupiter is the biggest planet in the solar system and weighs over 300 times more than the Earth, but it appears relatively small compared to the Moon due to its far distance from then Earth. When it is the closest to the Earth, it is almost 600 million kilometers (about 370 million miles) away.
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