By Joe Rao, SPACE.com Skywatching Columnist
As a young boy, one of my highlights of the Christmas season was visiting New York's Hayden Planetarium where they would stage their traditional sky show in which astronomers pondered the age-old question of the possible origin of the Star of Bethlehem.
Between 1935 and 1959, Hayden's very first Zeiss projector (three others have been installed since) was run back some 2,000 years in an attempt to reproduce the positions of the planets around the time of the birth of Christ. The entire procedure would take four hours with the planets engaged in an incredible fast-moving dance while the moon flipped around the sky a hundred times a minute! Ultimately, the projector was brought to a halt on Feb. 25 in the year 6 BC with the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Mars forming a triangle low in the western sky.
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Was the Star of Bethlehem a Star, Comet ... or Miracle?
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, Dec 23 2011 01:46 PM
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