For the rest of summer and into autumn, Jupiter will be the dominating bright light of the night sky, unless the moon is out, of course.

You might already have seen the king of the planets rising in the southeast as evening twilight ends. It's available in our heavens all night long as it arcs across the low southern sky.

Jupiter is in what astronomers call opposition with Earth. It certainly doesn't mean that Jupiter and Earth are on opposite ends of the solar system. To the contrary, they will actually be at their closest approach to each other, which is less than 400 million miles apart.

They're both on the same side of the sun in their respective orbits around our home star, with the Earth lying in the line between the sun and Jupiter. Because of that, Jupiter and the sun are at opposite ends of the sky. That's where the term opposition comes from. Just like a full moon, which we will have later next week, Jupiter rises at sunset and sets at sunrise.

Unfortunately, Jupiter is taking a low arc across the southern sky this summer. In fact, even at its highest point, around midnight this month, it only will be a little more than 20 degrees above the southern horizon. That's too bad because the lower any celestial object is, the more visual interference you have with Earth's atmosphere, especially if there's a lot of high altitude winds.

Despite the fact that Jupiter's a low rider in the sky, it's still well worth your time checking the great planet out through a telescope or even a decent pair of binoculars.

Your best viewing will be around midnight when it's at its highest, but even before that, you'll be able to resolve the disk of the goliath planet.

Depending on what night you look, you also might see up to four of Jupiter's biggest moons, looking like little "stars" on either side of the planet. These are called the Galilean moons in honor of Galileo, who was the first known person to study their orbits around Jupiter. He used these moons as part of his package of evidence that it was the Earth moving around the sun and not the other way around.

Later on this month in Starwatch, I want to give you more details on Jupiter's moons and how you can do things like watch their shadows transit the face of Jupiter.

In the meantime, let me share this Web site from the University of Maryland that will help you keep up with Jupiter's moons: www.astro.umd.edu/~lgm/astr120_fall97/jupiter.html.

Jupiter is one huge planet! It's more than 88,000 miles in diameter. In fact, you can fit more than 1,000 Earths inside of Jupiter. It's also two and a half times more massive than all the other planets in our solar system combined and has more than two and a half times the gravitational force of Earth.

If you weigh 175 pounds here, you would weigh more than 400 pounds on Jupiter, even with everything out of your pockets. If you tried to walk around on Jupiter, you wouldn't be able to for long. You would be very uncomfortable, to say the least!

Even if you were tough enough to take a stroll on Jupiter, you still couldn't. You'd sink into it, because Jupiter doesn't really have a surface. It's basically a big ball of hydrogen with some helium, spinning on its axis at an amazing rate of one rotation every ten hours.

When you check out Jupiter itself through your telescope, look for two dark bands or lines running on either side of its equator. When Jupiter is rising, they will be orientated diagonally.

If your scope is large enough and atmospheric conditions are just right, you might even see more cloud bands on Jupiter.

Of course in close-up pictures of the great planet, you can see much more detail in its atmosphere, which is made up of cloud bands of methane, ammonia, sulfur, and other elements. These clouds are whipped by winds of more than 200 miles an hour, and within the clouds are big storm systems, including the great red spot that's large enough to contain three Earths.

There now are two other smaller red spots or storms presently whirling on Jupiter. There's also lightning on Jupiter thousands of times more powerful than that on Earth.

Jupiter's atmosphere is so active because of heat generated within it. The giant gas ball continues to gravitationally collapse, causing it to ooze out infrared radiation.

Incidentally, there will be a lovely conjunction of the full moon and Jupiter Wednesday night, which also is the 39th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, the first lunar landing. The moon will be just to the lower right of Jupiter.

On Thursday night, the moon will be just to Jupiter's lower left. It will really light up your summer evenings this week!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and is author of the book, "Pennsylvania Starwatch," available at bookstores and at his Web site www.lynchandthestars.com.