The King of Plan­ets dom­i­nates our mid­night view as it reaches op­po­si­tion on Thursday. Directly op­po­site the sun in its or­bit, the sil­very-white light of Jupi­ter will be at its peak bright­ness.

Shin­ing in the con­stel­la­tion Cap­ri­cor­nus, Jupi­ter hov­ers above the moon on Saturday and beau­ti­ful Saturn hangs just above the moon on Friday.

Jupi­ter’s Gal­i­lean sat­el­lites are the moons Io, Gany­mede, Europa and Cal­listo. Fans of these moons will have their tele­scopes trained on the 2021 sea­son of eclipses and oc­cul­ta­tions, a pe­riod called the Mu­tual Eclipse sea­son. This cy­cli­cal shadow dance oc­curs ev­ery five years as Earth and Jupi­ter line up to the de­gree that the moons ap­pear edge on from our per­spec­tive. When this hap­pens, Jupi­ter’s moons are per­fectly placed to cast shad­ows on each other, some­times even plung­ing a neigh­bor­ing moon into to­tal eclipse as it passes by.

In the south­ern hemi­sphere, the crim­son-col­ored Great Red Spot whirls among Jupi­ter’s swirl­ing clouds. At 268-400 mph, the speed of the coun­ter­clock­wise mov­ing winds sur­passes any storm sys­tem on Earth. The mys­tery of the Red Spot’s slightly shift­ing col­or­ation has re­mained un­solved despite the Pioneer 10 mis­sion fly-by in 1973 and continuing Juno mis­sion ob­ser­va­tions, Equally enig­matic is the chang­ing size of the iconic storm which has been noted to be shrink­ing over the last cen­tury.

First Published: August 16, 2021, 4:00 a.m.