It was literally an all-star ensemble.
In the darkness of the forest at night, unobstructed by distracting artificial light sources, Orion, Sirius and the moon presented a magnificent spectacle that I feasted my eyes on.
Standing next to a redwood tree that was once transplanted from America to Europe, I enjoyed the celestial spectacle and although the moon was only half lit, it was so bright that the tree and all other objects cast distinct shadows.
Other old star acquaintances such as the mighty, enormously bright Jupiter had also come to the star show and lent it their inimitable brilliance.

Among the many places where one can find sanity and distance when the people around one have gone batshit crazy, nature is one of the best places to be.
In the nocturnal forest, there is no need to be afraid of wild beasts.
These creatures are infinitely more sane than the raging lunatics, the anxiety-ridden hysterics, the totalitarian, foaming-at-the-mouth, often violent mental defectives and those immunized by propaganda against all logic and reason that populate the Western world today.

Anyway, the star show wasn’t over even after the walk in the forest had ended, because during the drive home the heavens threw a large shooting star as an encore, which was clearly visible in the car.

Originally I was going to write a different post in relation to the experience I’ve just shared with you, but to hell with all the craziness.
Instead, I’m going to share my joy with you and together we’re going to have a lot of fun and an interesting experience.

The change of direction came when I wanted to create a fitting image for the post by using a program called “skyglobe”, a planetarium/astronomy program I always loved because of its still unsurpassed speed and ease of use.
The bad news: it doesn’t run on Windows 10.
The good news: you can run the program within your browser. Yay!
All you need to do is go to this web page, click on a button, press a key and the program runs.
While playing around with the program, the idea was born to take you, dear reader, on a voyage through time and space and to provide you with a great tool for learning and entertainment, especially for kids.

What’s so great about skyglobe?
Not only does the program show an accurate representation of the sky and all objects such as stars, planets, etc. as they can be seen at any chosen location on earth, but you can also set the time of this view into the starry sky as you wish.
Skyglobe can go back to the year 30,000 BC or into the distant future to the year 30,000.
It’s effectively a time machine. How exciting!
How did the sky look like at my birthplace at the day I was born? That’s what you always wanted to know, isn’t it? 😉
But, my fellow explorer, I’m going to take you on a far more exciting voyage that goes back more than 2,000 years.

As we all know, every voyage needs a reason to not only be exciting and adventurous, but also to become a meaningful quest.
Our mission is to solve a mystery that many have failed to solve.
Our mission is nothing less than to answer the age-old question:

What was the Star of Bethlehem?

Now that you know the breathtaking scope of our mission, it’s time to warm up our time machine, but before we do, here’s some useful information to keep in mind before you click on the link below:

• The program can capture the mouse pointer so that you cannot move it outside its window.
  Don’t worry, you can ALWAYS release the mouse pointer by pressing the ESC key.
  Press the key only ONCE if the mouse pointer is trapped. If you press the key twice, skyglobe will exit and you will have to reload the web page to start it again.
  
• The link will open in a new browser tab, so you can easily switch between this post and our time machine.

Ready? Ok, click on this link and when you’re on the other web page click the green button.

When the browser is done with loading, the image will look like this:

Press any key.
That’s it. The program is running now and waits for your input.

Determining our destination

Before we can get started, we need to determine the place and time we want to travel to.
To this end, I have done some research of my own.
The widespread use of the word “magi” to describe the three wise men who followed the star of Bethlehem suggests that they came from Persia, as the word “magi” has its roots in the Persian language.

Furthermore, Persia at that time was a highly developed civilization that undoubtedly had great knowledge of astronomy and the movement of the stars and planets, as well as mathematics.
There were many contacts between the Jews and the Persians, and ancient Israel was once part of the Persian Empire.
It is far more likely that learned and wise men in Persia were aware of the prophet Micah, who prophesied the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem, than Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula.
It is therefore reasonable to assume that the three wise men came from Persia.

Now, where would three very learned and wise dudes with a very high social status live?
My guess is that they would live where all highly learned dudes with a very high social status live.
As indispensable advisors to the king, his administration or his officials, they would naturally be at the center of power, not far from the royal palace.

The capitals of Persia have changed several times over the long history of the Persian empires.
But whether Persepolis, Nisa or Ctesiphon, the typical route taken from all three cities to Jerusalem around the year 1 AD was via Damascus.

So Damascus is the place through which our three wise Persians passed.
Damascus is the place where they would follow the star of Bethlehem.
That is the place we want to travel to.

As for our target date, our job is much easier.
It seems that many scholars agree that Jesus was born between 6 and 4 BC.
We will settle on July 7 BC to be on the safe side.

We have all the information we need now.
Are you ready for the voyage of your life?
Good!

The voyage begins

As with any voyage, our travel will take time.’
It is best to take every step slowly and methodically.
If you want to continue at a later point in time, just leave your browser open.
This way you can resume where you have left and don’t need to start again from scratch.

Setting the location is pretty easy.
As you can see from the list of commands at the right side of our time machine’s window, you have to press the L-key on your keyboard to set the location.
In the list of locations select “More locations” and press ENTER.

Now select Damascus and press ENTER.

Don’t worry if the program looks different from the image below.
After all, the output depends totally on the date and the time of day.
What is important though, is that at the place I’ve marked with a red rectangle, the location is shown correctly.
This is also the place where the selected time and date are displsyed.

At the commands list you can see this command: “U Millenium”.
Pressing the key U will jump 1,000 years forward.
The use of this program is very simple. Whenever you want a command to do the opposite you have to press the SHIFT-key together with the key assigned to a command.So to jump 1,000 years back in time you need to press the SHIFT-key, keep it pressed and press the U-Key. It’s the same as typing capital letters..

Since we need to go back 2,000 years, keep the SHIFT-key pressed and press the U-key twice.
Next, hold the SHIFT key and press the Y-Key repeatedly until the program displays the year 7 BC.
Here’s another useful information.
If, for any reason, you have totally messed up time and date, you can always set the program to the current time and date by simply pressing the R-key (R stands for realtime).
To continue setting time and date manually, press the R-key again.

Next, use the H-key to set the hour and the T-key to set the minutes.
We set the time to 10:00 PM.
It has to be dark night for our wise men to see the stars.

Next, set the Month to July using the M-key.
If necessary you can adjust the day by using the D-key.
The final result should be:
10:00 PM
Jul 07 7BC

Isn’t it awesome? In a few minutes we have traveled more than 2,000 years into the past and a few thousand miles!

The sky over Damascus in the year 7 BC

We are standing in Damascus and looking south.
The green line in the picture below is the horizon and the letter S tells us that we are looking south:

As Bethlehem is located roughly southwest of Damascus, we have to look southwest.
To do this, we press the Right-Arrow-key a few times until the horizon looks like the one below.

The sky should look now exactly like the one shown below.
The various lines (mostly orange) are not real objects, but a visual aid to help you quickly identify the constellations.
For example, the constellation in the bottom right corner is Virgo, the Virgin.
While these lines are normally a great help, in our case they are a distraction.
That’s why we want to turn them off.
Pressing the C-Key cycles trough through the various visual representations of the constellations.
Just press the C-key a few times until the constellation lines disappear completely.

There should be only a red line visible.

This one red line remaining in the image above is called the Ecliptic and it is the plane on which all planets except Pluto are orbiting the sun.
That’s why you will see them moving back and forth along the red line when you change the date.

The final stretch

We are now going forward in time in steps of one day by pressing the D-key again and again.
Nothing spectacular happens at first, but then!
From mid-September, we see a massive object moving down the red line.
Actually, there are two massive objects. They are Jupiter and Saturn, but they are so close to each other that you can hardly tell them apart.
Wow!

You ALL have seen Jupiter even though many of you might not have known what you were looking at.
Because Jupiter, a giant gas ball, is the biggest planet in our solar system, it is extremely bright.
In fact, it is so bright that it can be often seen even through a thin viele of clouds.
Saturn, even though not as bright as Jupiter, is still pretty bright.
On September 20, 7BC, this is where these two giants are:

With each passing day, these two bad boys move further down the ecliptic:
Man, that must have been a spectacular sight.
By December 2, 7BC, our duo is pretty far down the ecliptic.
We are continuing one day after another.

Finally! The star of Bethlehem

On December 25, this very special day, we change our location for the last time.
We teleport ourselves to Jerusalem..

We are now only a few kilometers away from Bethlehem.
Although Bethlehem is more south than southwest of Jersualem, our celestial duo is still close enough to Bethlehem and because of the short distance to Bethlehem, the angle at which we approach the town makes a big difference in how the relative position of the two planets is perceived and because of the fact that this pair of planets was so low on the horizon, it is very possible that our planetary duo was perceived as stopping over a single house in or around Bethlehem.
I would say that this great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn is a pretty good candidate for the Star of Bethlehem.

Final thoughts

Great conjunctions, as the meeting of Jupiter and Saturn is called, take place every 20 years, but the likelyhood of a great conjunction ever happening again where all circumstances such as visibility, angle etc. are the same is practically zero.
It’s like throwing a dice on a table. You will roll a six very often,
You will practically never roll a six again that lands in exactly the same place.

The discrepancy of 7 years between the year 1 AD and our date doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
People can misremember the year, calendars change, mistakes happen, etc.
Basically, the year in which something happens is much harder to remember than the season or month.
The year is just a number that, apart from its numerical value, is no different from any other year, whereas each season and month are unique.
It is more difficult to confuse months and seasons than to confuse years.

I hope you have enjoyed our voyage as much as I have.
May all your voyages be pleasant ones.