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But it came to pass at the time

Anyone stargazing in 1996/97 may have felt reminded of the biblical Christmas story as the comet Hale-Bopp drew its fiery tail over the night horizon for a few months. This celestial body shone as brightly as perhaps the star of Bethlehem at that time. Today it is certain: in the year eleven BC, Halley’s Comet came quite close to earth. By the time of Christ’s birth about four years later, however, he had already moved on. Scientists had to put the comet thesis aside as inconclusive; even more so since the ancients regarded comets not as heralds of good tidings but as messengers of doom.
Johannes Kepler, on the other hand, considered the biblical heavenly phenomenon to be a conjunction of Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn like the one he had observed from his window in Prague on Christmas morning 1603. His calculations showed that in the year seven BC the planets in the constellation Pisces must have come very close. A supernova the following year that outshone all the stars in the sky underscored Kepler’s assumption.
Most theologians, however, put the heavenly light mentioned in the Bible into the realm of legend. In the Old Testament, prophecies heralded the coming of the Messiah with a shining star, and this is probably why Matthew included this feature in his Gospel.
Whether comet, supernova or double planet: at Christmas time the Zeiss planetarium Berlin on Prenzlauer Allee deals with this celestial phenomenon. In 1987, after only two years of construction, it was opened being one of the largest and most modern planetariums in Germany and Europe.