Jupiter reaches opposition of the Sun on May 8th (YES that is TOMORROW/TODAY!). I caught it a few days before opposition, but be sure to look eastwards about an hour after sunset and you won’t miss it.

NASA is a bit better at taking photos of it though. These two were taken on one of the 12 perijoves of the Juno probe. A perijove is “the point in the orbit of a satellite of Jupiter nearest the planet’s center.” Juno hits perijove every 53 days at which point the JunoCam takes a bunch of photos in 2 megapixel glory.  Juno was launched in 2011, but the first perijove wasn’t until 2016. Juno is exposed to extreme radiation during each orbit and the probe only has a couple orbits left before NASA crashes it into Jupiter’s atmosphere (they don’t want to create space trash after all). The last orbit will occur on July 16th. It is a great time to be a Jupiter fan.

Well Andrew, that’s all good, but what are the names of the other periapsides? I’m glad you asked!

Mercury – Perihermion
Venus – Pericytherion
Mars – Periareion
Saturn – Perikron
Uranus – Periuranion
Neptune – Periposeidon
And yes Pluto still gets one – Perihadion
(Yes, there are corresponding apsides but I won’t bore you)

JunoCam transmits at a whopping 325 bits per second. In other words, if JunoCam was transmitting your favorite show on netflix, you’d be buffering for about 115 days.

Okay okay, one more — A peribothron is the closest point in an orbit around a black hole!