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I'm a morning person. Beyond 10pm is mostly a mystery to me these days, I cease to function on any practical level around lunchtime. This means I do wake early, before sunrise mostly, which is fabulous at the moment as beaming through the window at me, the brightest thing by far, is Jupiter.
It's visible from sunset, rising in the east, it's 6.30am CET at the moment and Jupiter is almost exactly due west, you can't miss it. Slap in the middle of Gemini, next to Castor and Pollux.
Cool facts about Jupiter:
It has a mass of 2.5 x all the rest of the planets in our solar system combined.
It's a gas giant, made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium.
1321 planet Earths would fit inside it.
It orbits the Sun at 29,000 miles per hour.
Jupiter's orbit around the Sun is roughly once every 12 years, which means to an observer on Earth it seems to move round one constellation a year. This may be the origin of the constellations, and why there's 12 of them.
Jupiter has 67 moons. The 4 largest, from closest to Jupiter to furthest, are Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, named after Zeus' lovers. Ganymede is larger than the planet Mercury.
The NASA spacecraft Juno was launched in 2011 to study Jupiter from orbit, it should arrive in late 2016.
It's visible from sunset, rising in the east, it's 6.30am CET at the moment and Jupiter is almost exactly due west, you can't miss it. Slap in the middle of Gemini, next to Castor and Pollux.
Cool facts about Jupiter:
It has a mass of 2.5 x all the rest of the planets in our solar system combined.
It's a gas giant, made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium.
1321 planet Earths would fit inside it.
It orbits the Sun at 29,000 miles per hour.
Jupiter's orbit around the Sun is roughly once every 12 years, which means to an observer on Earth it seems to move round one constellation a year. This may be the origin of the constellations, and why there's 12 of them.
Jupiter has 67 moons. The 4 largest, from closest to Jupiter to furthest, are Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, named after Zeus' lovers. Ganymede is larger than the planet Mercury.
The NASA spacecraft Juno was launched in 2011 to study Jupiter from orbit, it should arrive in late 2016.