Jupiter

PLANETGas giant

[

OVERVIEW

] PLANET

Jupiter is a . It orbits the Sun at a mean distance of 5.202887 . It has a mass of 1.00 and a mean radius of 0.98 · 69 911 . It has been known since antiquity.

The Solar System's giant — more massive than all other planets combined, with a storm larger than Earth that has raged for centuries.

WHAT IT IS: Gas giant
HOW FAR: 5.203
HOW BIG: 0.98 · 69 911
ONE ORBIT TAKES: 11.9

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THE MODEL

] CATALOGUED RADIUS

DRAG TO ORBIT

CALCULATED · NOT AN OBSERVATION · CATALOGUED RADIUS · DENSITY 1.33 G/CM³ FROM MASS AND RADIUS · GEOMETRIC ALBEDO 0.520 · GAS GIANT · RADIUS 69 900 KM · LIT FROM WHERE THE SUN IS · TURNING ABOUT ITS OWN POLE · SURFACE FROM A GLOBAL MAP · LONGITUDES NOT REGISTERED

Drawn from the catalogued radius and from the same properties the picture at the top of this page uses, at the distance a flight to it would stop. It has a ring, and it is not in this picture: the outermost reaches 1.8 times the body's own radius, and every band out there is either narrower than the line it would be drawn as or too thin to darken what is behind it. It is in the model, at its catalogued edges; the frame is set on the planet, because widening it to hold it would trade most of the planet for a piece of empty sky. The surface is a global map rather than a pattern — a mosaic of real images, wrapped on by latitude and longitude. It is Cassini's map of the clouds over nine hours in December 2000, in colours close to what the eye would see. Where it sits round the axis claims nothing: what a map of a fluid envelope shows is weather, and the clouds in this one have moved since it was taken. The map comes from NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute, in the public domain. Drag it, or use the arrow keys, to look from another direction. The stars behind are the 498,631 this catalogue holds real distances for, at their real positions and drawn from where the camera actually is — so the constellations are wrong, and that is the point. This is the sky from there, not the sky from here.

[

IMAGES

] 4 FRAMES

NASA/STSCI (S.T.A.R.S)
Public domain
NASA, ESA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Ricardo Hueso (UPV/EHU) and Judy Schmidt
CC BY 4.0
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Public domain
Hubble Space Telescope Comet Team and NASA
Public domain

[

OBSERVING

] FROM WHERE YOU ARE

What it takes to see Jupiter for yourself. Everything in this part of the page is worked out for a real horizon, a real night and the equipment you say you have.

TONIGHT

Say where you are, and this line says when Jupiter is worth going out for.

SEE ITS ORBIT FLY TO JUPITER

[

THROUGH AN EYEPIECE

] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECE

2.1′ ACROSS

Bright enough to pick out with your eyes alone, and from a lit street as well as a dark one. Today it is 31.5″ across. It stops being a point of light at about 2×, and at 48× it is a clear disc with an edge you can see.

: 48×
: 1.08
: 1.25
: 13.0
: 31.5
SHOWS A DISC FROM: 2×
AS WIDE AS THE MOON LOOKS AT: 59×
RINGS ACROSS: 58.1
MAGNITUDE TODAY: −1.81 · within reach

The rings reach 58.1″ from edge to edge. What decides whether there is anything there to look at is the material rather than the reach: the densest band, Main, is 1.46″ wide on the sky — set that against the above — and its of 0.000005 stops 0.0005% of the light passing through it.

Its largest moons swing out to 1.6′ for Io, 2.5′ for Europa, 4.0′ for Ganymede and 7.1′ for Callisto, at their widest. Every one of them gets further out than this equipment separates. How bright they are is another question, and one the catalogue does not answer: it publishes no magnitude for any moon.

Computed for 2026-09-11 from the centre of the Earth, and from the mean radius the catalogue holds. A distance changes daily, so this width is a fact about that date and not about the body.

[

CATALOG DATA

] 13 FIELDS

The raw catalogue values, as the source published them, with the error bars where one was published — sorted by what each set of figures is about rather than by the order they happened to be stored in.

WHAT KIND OF THING IT IS

What the object is in itself, rather than how it happens to look from here.

Mean temperature: −110
Rotation period: 9.93

HOW BRIGHT IT IS

What the light adds up to, measured through one filter at a time. A magnitude is a brightness on a backwards scale — the smaller the number, the brighter the object.

Geometric albedo: 0.52
Bond albedo: 0.503

WHERE IT IS AND HOW IT MOVES

Position, motion across the sky and the size it covers on it. These are measurements of the object as seen from here, so every one of them depends on where here is.

North pole (RA): 268.057
North pole (Dec): 64.495

THE ORBIT

The shape of the path, where the object sits on it, and the instant those figures were true of. An orbit is a fit to observations and drifts away from the real one either side of its epoch.

Orbital period: 11.86
Eccentricity
Inclination: 1.3
Longitude of ascending node: 100.47
Longitude of perihelion: 14.73
Mean longitude: 34.4
Element epoch: 2451545.0000

[

ALSO KNOWN AS

] 1 DESIGNATIONS

Common name Jupiter

[

CITE THIS PAGE

] DR1

This page is live and its numbers move when an upstream refreshes, so the citation names the release the rows belong to rather than the day you read them. The release itself is frozen, republished as a bundle, and is what a data-availability statement should point at.

PLAIN TEXT

SpaceCatalog. Jupiter [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/jupiter

BIBTEX

@misc{spacecatalog_jupiter,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{Jupiter}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/jupiter},
  note         = {Catalogue entry, data release DR1 (2026-08-21). Values from SpaceCatalog curated data.}
}

The values above were taken from SpaceCatalog curated data — CC-BY-4.0. Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue.

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