With or without a telescope, the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn make skywatching simple and rewarding by hanging close, bright and long in the night sky. Saturn is the brightest it has been in more than two decades.

A neat feature of celestial alignment makes all this possi ble: Jupiter and Saturn each reach their "opposition" during November.

What is opposition? If you could view the solar system from above, you’d see Earth racing around the Sun on an inner track, more quickly than the gas giants. When our planet "catches up" with Jupiter and Saturn, it sits squarely between them and the Sun.

"At opposition, a planet generally rises at sunset, is high in the south at midnight, and sets at sunrise," explains Kevin Conod, astronomer at the Newark Museum’s Dreyfuss Planetarium in New Jersey. "Opposition is also the point at which a planet is closest to Earth. Therefore it appears larger and subtle features can be easier to view."

So to see Jupiter and Saturn, all you have to do is go outside and look up. And with a pair of binoculars, more surprises await.

"Many people are surprised that the moons of Jupiter are visible in binoculars," Conod said. "You can watch them change position in a surprisingly short amount of time."

The moons appear as small pinpoints of light, like tiny stars.

A small telescope will also resolve some of Jupiter’s colorful cloud features. A larger telescope can reveal Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and the Cassini Division, a dark band dividing the major rings of Saturn, as well as a handful of Saturn’s moons.

"Both planets will remain prominent in the night sky throughout November and December," says James White, executive director of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. "Jupiter is by far the brightest object in the southeastern part of the sky in the early evening. Saturn...lies to the upper right of Jupiter in the early evening."
Space.com