{"id":145678,"date":"2022-09-05T19:22:17","date_gmt":"2022-09-06T00:22:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/you-need-to-see-the-most-elusive-planet-at-opposition-in-the-sky-this-month"},"modified":"2022-09-05T19:22:17","modified_gmt":"2022-09-06T00:22:17","slug":"you-need-to-see-the-most-elusive-planet-at-opposition-in-the-sky-this-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/you-need-to-see-the-most-elusive-planet-at-opposition-in-the-sky-this-month","title":{"rendered":"You need to see the most elusive planet at opposition in the sky this month"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/you-need-to-see-the-most-elusive-planet-at-opposition-in-the-sky-this-month.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>At opposition, and on surrounding nights, Neptune rises in the east around sunset and will be visible all night long, traveling along the ecliptic (the apparent path of the Sun and planets in Earth\u2019s sky). Neptune can be seen in the constellation of Aquarius, below the \u201ccirclet\u201d asterism of Pisces, and to the west of Jupiter.<\/p>\n<p>The planet is in apparent retrograde motion (appearing to travel backwards in its orbit relative to Earth) from June 28 to December 3. Neptune will be at its closest to Earth the day before opposition, September 15, at only 2.7 billion miles (4.3 billion km) distance. At opposition, the Sun\u2019s light will fully illuminate the planet\u2019s surface, casting light directly onto Neptune from Earth\u2019s point of view.<\/p>\n<p>Since it is not visible to the naked eye, Neptune was unknown to astronomers until the 1800s, when it was the first planet to be discovered by mathematical prediction, rather than direct observation, owing to gravitational perturbation on the orbit of Uranus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At opposition, and on surrounding nights, Neptune rises in the east around sunset and will be visible all night long, traveling along the ecliptic (the apparent path of the Sun and planets in Earth\u2019s sky). Neptune can be seen in the constellation of Aquarius, below the \u201ccirclet\u201d asterism of Pisces, and to the west of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":631,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2229,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-145678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/631"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145678\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}