While thousands of Christians around the world joined worshipers in Washington and Bethlehem Saturday for the annual Bethlehem Prayer Service in Washington D.C., and 2.039 billion Christians (32% of world population) prepared for the celebration of the birth of Jesus, former high school astronomy teacher, Irene Worthington Baron, was announcing that she thinks she has unraveled the mystery of the Christmas Star of Bethlehem.
Yeah, I know, but as I read more, it became very interesting.
Her search began when she received 60 astronomy computer programs from NASA for her classroom.
By using the programs to recapture star locations, etc., about the time Jesus was born, led her to some fascinating discoveries.
In her book she claims that her findings reveal that there were 10 major celestial events announcing the birth of Jesus Christ, the last being the position marker over Bethlehem.
She has released an ebook titled, "Unraveling The Christmas Star Mystery".
This is how the Christianpost.com reported the story:
She writes, “The sixth significant event of Jesus’ birth announcement occurred on September 1st, 0004 when a spectacular solar eclipse occurred close to Mars, Venus, and Saturn while the Sun was partially eclipsing the slow moving Saturn. The Moon then moved in front of the Sun and totally eclipsed it. To have the Sun eclipsing Saturn and the Moon eclipsing the Sun simultaneously is an extremely rare event at any time, let alone for a dawn sky.”
She told CP that the, “Christmas star was, in fact, Saturn.” It was on the other side of the sun during that time and was very bright in the night sky. It was moving right over Bethlehem during a two-week time period.
So how did she discover all of this?
The author began using the NASA programs to research the dawn sky around the time of Christ’s birth. Baron figured she could go back in time with the computer programs to look at what the star patterns were like during that time.
She set all calculations during her computer searches for dawn in the local time zone of Bethlehem while using the correct latitude and longitude for that location. The computer programs would then go back in time and print out sky maps from the time and place in the sky she indicated.
When the computer would finally print something out, sometimes after days of waiting, Baron would look at the sky charts for unusual patterns like eclipses.
Once she located different sky patterns she would then look at the symbolism of ancient cultures during the time around the birth of Christ that had also noted similar occurrences. She began an extensive study of books written by historians and archaeologists. Their data was based primarily on historical records, paintings and carvings on ancient temples, coins and legal seals.
The planets and stars have set patterns, so astronomers as far back as 4,000 years ago, beginning in Babylonian times, could use mathematics to predict how the celestial objects would move for a year or more in advance. For ancient cultures, each motion, interaction, and happening in the sky meant something.
They used their symbolism to interpret what happened in the sky. And each planet or star symbolized a god. When they began seeing the eclipses surrounding the birth of Christ, they took this to symbolize a larger more powerful god was coming to earth.
Because of this, Baron said, the wise men had advance knowledge through their study of the stars that Christ would be born because of different happenings among the movement of the planets and stars. So they were able to have enough time to travel from their homelands to Bethlehem to pay homage to Jesus.
In her ebook, Baron provides charts and pictures to further explain her findings. She says her research “will confirm what Christians believe, and validate the Bible.”
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