To match your eyepiece: stop nudging the telescope and watch which way Jupiter slides — it always drifts toward the DRIFT arrow. Turn the view with ↺ ↻ until the arrow points the same way. Jupiter’s belts and every moon will then line up with what you see.
Now
night at your location Ganymede swinging east ↔ west
Jupiter Tonight
When to See It
Dates for your saved location. Each year the planet slips behind the Sun’s glare for a few weeks, then reappears in the morning sky.
Coming Up on Jupiter›
A moon’s shadow crossing Jupiter’s face shows in a small telescope as a crisp black dot. The moon itself is harder to pick out against the bright clouds. Events marked visible happen while Jupiter is up and the sky is dark at your location.
The Galilean Moons Right Now
The Four Worlds
The Planet Itself
One day
9h 56m
The fastest spin of any planet — it bulges 7% at the equator
Diameter
139,820 km
11 Earths across
Mass
318 Earths
More than all the other planets combined, twice over
Year
11.9 years
About one zodiac constellation per year
Great Red Spot
~1.3 Earths
Wide — a storm watched for over 150 years, slowly shrinking
Known moons
95+
Four big enough to see in binoculars
The dark stripes are belts — warmer, sinking gas — and the bright stripes are zones of cool, rising cloud topped with ammonia ice. The two dark equatorial belts show in the smallest telescope; the Great Red Spot sits in a notch on the south edge of the southern one.