12/20/2022 – Ephemeris – Hunting for the Star of Bethlehem: When did Herod the Great Die – Part 1

This is Ephemeris for Tuesday, December 20th. Today the Sun will be up for 8 hours and 48 minutes, setting at 5:04, and it will rise tomorrow at 8:16. The Moon, 3 days before new, will rise at 6:20 tomorrow morning.

In looking for the year Jesus was born and the appearance of the Star of Bethlehem, we look to the latter years of Herod the Great’s reign. Jewish historian Josephus recounts that Herod died shortly after an eclipse of the Moon occurred. The date of that eclipse, according to many historians, was March 13th, of 4 BCE and before Passover, a month later. The Greek text of Matthew states that Herod’s visitors, looking for the newborn King of the Jews, were Magi. Magi were priest-astrologers of the Zoroastrian Religion of Persia. That being the case, the Star could have been the triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn against the constellation of Pisces, when three times Jupiter passed Saturn between the end of May and early December of 7 BCE.

The astronomical event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (EST, UT –5 hours). They may be different for your location.

Addendum

The Jupiter-Saturn triple conjunction of 7 BC. Click on the image to enlarge and animate. This animation is at 5-day intervals. The conjunctions took place against the stars of Pisces the fish, a constellation thought, in those days, to be associated with the Jews. The Moon will be popping in and out of the view. It ends in February of 6 BC, when Mars and the Moon enters the picture. Click on the image to enlarge it. Created using Cartes du Ciel and GIMP.

Above is an animation of the triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn of 7 BCE in 5 day steps. The body popping in and frame is the Moon. The first conjunction was on May 29th. Both planets stopped their eastward motion around July 6th. Astrologically, they became stationary and began their westward or retrograde motion. The second conjunction was on October 11th. Both planets stopped their westward or retrograde motion on November 1st. Again they were stationary to resume their normal eastward motion. The third and last conjunction was on December 8th. Two months later, on February 21st, of 6 BCE, Mars joined the group as they all move off to the western sky in the evening. Using this triple conjunction as the Star of Bethlehem, Jesus would have been born in the late autumn of 7 BCE or early winter of 6 BCE.

This lunar eclipse candidate for the eclipse that heralded the death of Herod the Great, and the favorite, since the time of Johannes Kepler, is the lunar eclipse of March 13, 4 BCE. It was a partial eclipse, only visible in the predawn hours. This eclipse occurred one lunar month before Passover.
Too little time for all the events Josephus describes. A better lunar eclipse occurred a bit less than three years later. Those defending the 4 BCE eclipse sometimes suggest that the Passover mentioned by Josephus was the next year’s Passover of 3 BCE. If it was the next year’s Passover, why mention Passover at all?

Tomorrow I’ll take a break to look to the naked eye planets, and to the winter solstice. Winter begins tomorrow! Thursday I’ll look to a better lunar eclipse and begin to explore another Bethlehem Star candidate.

12/19/2022 – Ephemeris – Hunting for the Star of Bethlehem: What it wasn’t

This is Ephemeris for Monday, December 19th. Today the Sun will be up for 8 hours and 48 minutes, setting at 5:04, and it will rise tomorrow at 8:16. The Moon, 3 days past last quarter, will rise at 4:59 tomorrow morning.

In these last days before Christmas, I’d like to explore what in the sky could have been the Star of Bethlehem from an astronomical point of view. If it had to do with the arrangement of planets, tracing back two thousand years would be simple. If it was some sudden appearance of an actual star or comet, we would have to rely on contemporary accounts. Those would have to come from the Chinese and Koreans. The state of astronomy around the Mediterranean and the Middle East was pretty stagnant due to the fact that they thought that the heavens were perfect and changeless, so things like comets and novae or “New Stars” meant change, so were not really part of the heavens. So we must look for something more mundane.

The astronomical event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (EST, UT –5 hours). They may be different for your location.

Addendum

Probably the first person to kick off the search for the Star of Bethlehem was Johannes Kepler. (These are slides from this year’s Searching for the Star of Bethlehem presentation I gave to the Grand Traverse Astronomical Society. The captions are from the text of the presentation)

The search for the Star really started with Johannes Kepler, who lived from 1571 to 1630. He was an astronomer, although he cast horoscopes for the odd prince or duke, which is how he made a living. His mother was even charged for being a witch, but nothing came of it. And after much trial and error discovered his Three Laws of Planetary Motion. His story is a fascinating one.

Kepler also discovered a supernova, the last one seen in the Milky Way. This is an old star chart that records Kepler’s Star,
a supernova, or super bright new star, he discovered on October 9, 1604. I colored it yellow and have an arrow pointed to it, in Ophiuchus’ right ankle.

Here is a Stellarium recreation of the sky the night of his discovery. It’s the southwestern sky near the end of evening twilight, October 9, 1604, the night Kepler discovered the supernova that bears his name. It got him to thinking, could a similar grouping of a nova and planets be the Star of Bethlehem?
He knew of no nova being reported back then, though no one in the western world probably would have. That would be a change in the officially changeless heavens, so it couldn’t possibly have been a real heavenly object. And being the mathematical genius he was, (he did discover the Three Laws of Planetary Motion), found a very interesting conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, with Mars piling on later, that occurred in 7 BCE. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

12/20/2021 – Ephemeris – Could the Star of Bethlehem have been a triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 7 BCE?

This is Ephemeris for Monday, December 20th. Today the Sun will be up for 8 hours and 48 minutes, setting at 5:04, and it will rise tomorrow at 8:17. The Moon, 2 days past full, will rise at 6:12 this evening.

This year we have two bright evening Christmas stars, Venus and Jupiter. But what about the one described in the Bible, in the Gospel of Matthew? We will look today at the first of two events that may have been recorded as the Star of Bethlehem. In 7 BCE there was a rare event over 6 months when three times the planet Jupiter passed Saturn against the stars of the constellation Pisces. Could the Persian astrologer priests, called Magi, have read into the event enough significance to start the journey to Jerusalem in search of the newborn King of the Jews? It was the scribe’s readings that sent them to Bethlehem. Jupiter, Saturn and Pisces all may have had significance to the Magi.

The astronomical event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (EST, UT – 5 hours). They may be different for your location.

Addendum

Jupiter and Saturn pass each other three times from May to December in 7 BC. Created using Cartes du Ciel (Sky Charts) and GIMP.

This timing of the Star is based on the Jewish historian Josephus, dating the death of Herod the Great just before a lunar eclipse. The eclipse most historians accept was the one on March 13, 4 BCE. So Jesus could have been born in 6 BCE.

I have been giving a presentation to the Grand Traverse Astronomical Society every other December since the 1980s on the Star of Bethlehem, tweaking it each time, and completely rewriting it a few times. Below is my script from my 2020 program In Search of the Star of Bethlehem for the Grand Traverse Astronomical Society. It has small thumbnails of the slides. The name says notes, but it evolved into a complete script, and is laid out to be read that way.

Star of Bethlehem 2020 Notes (PDF)

In the presentation, I cover another possibility for the “Star”, which I happen to like more. I’ll talk about that on Christmas Eve. If you can’t wait, check out the PDF, or a prior December program in the Archives.