Finally Released! The James Webb Telescope Jupiter's Image We’ve All Been Waiting For!

No One Alive Has Ever Seen This Happen to Jupiter — And It Starts Next Week Jupiter is turning edge-on to Earth. For a few months around its equinox on December 16, 2026, its four largest moons eclipse and pass in front of one another, a season that comes back only about every six years. Sky guides call it a cosmic ballet. But this alignment is also one of the rare windows when astronomers can audit the entire Jupiter system, and what that audit reveals is hard to ignore. We follow the real evidence: an estimated ~22 impacts a year on Jupiter bright enough to be seen from Earth, almost all of them unrecorded; a Great Red Spot that has shrunk from roughly 41,000 km to about 16,500 km; a comet whose path Jupiter bent so far that it was lost for more than a century; and the uncertain future of NASA's Juno, the only spacecraft orbiting Jupiter, while Europa Clipper (2030) and JUICE (2031) are still years away. This isn't a doomsday story. It's about the gap between how Jupiter is presented and how little of the time we actually watch it, and about how you can help close that gap. Want to contribute? Amateur Jupiter videos can be scanned for impact flashes with the free DeTeCt software, and mutual-event timings are welcomed by the British Astronomical Association and the IMCCE's PHEMU campaign. Where are you watching from? Tell me in the comments. Sources and further reading: British Astronomical Association: Mutual events of the Galilean satellites 2026–27 IMCCE: PHEMU observing campaign (Jupiter equinox 2026) Delcroix & Hueso, "Jupiter impacts monitoring till 2026 apparition," Europlanet Science Congress 2026 NASA/JPL: Hubble measurements of the shrinking Great Red Spot Space.com: reporting on the status of NASA's Juno mission #Jupiter #Astronomy #Space