The night sky is one of those wonders of life that ought to be for everyone, but for most of us, enjoying a night gazing up at the stars in wonder isn't as easy as it should be. If you're in a city, much of the cosmos will be drowned out by the lights closer to the ground. And if you want to see anything up there in detail, you generally need to invest in costly apparatus and figure out how to use it correctly.
That's why you have to take advantage of opportunities like this when they come up.
In particular, we've learned more and gotten better views of two of the solar system's jewels over the past decade, as the Cassini probe visited Saturn and Juno spent some time at Jupiter. Obviously NASA learned all kinds of things about each planet, but for the rest of us, it was all about the pics.
Even before Juno, we knew that Jupiter was both massive and gorgeous, but we had never seen it in such high-definition detail — the Van Gogh-like swirling and whirling of the gas giant's mighty clouds, the many-layered, multicolored bands moving like rivers across the planet's face, the angry knots of storms.
It's not scheduled to end its mission by plunging into Jupiter's clouds until July 2021, so there's plenty of time left for it to find even more cool things to see.
Unfortunately, none of us is about to see Jupiter in such detail with our own eyes anytime soon. But the planet is doing its part to help out with the next best thing, to the delight of stargazers everywhere.
As NASA said, the planet will rise around dusk and stay visible the whole night. And, because it will be at its closest point to Earth, there's no better time to try to check it out.
And even with a normal pair of binoculars, you'll be able to make out details like its four biggest moons. With a telescope, you might even be able to make out some of those colorful bands that swirl around the planet.
You can't ask for much better stargazing than that!
