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what was the star of Bethlehem
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24-12-2012 12:01am#1
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Reads like a bad Dan Brown novel, and bad astronomy as well!
What does it mean that Sirius "aligns with" Orion's belt. They're not called the "fixed stars" for nothing -- Sirius doesn't move relative to Orion's belt or any other stars, and it's not in a straight line with the belt. Even if you could make some sort of line with them, that line rotates through the night, so you could pick anywhere you want it to point at some particular time.
Virgo doesn't rise at "ten o'clock until dawn" (whatever that even means). Spica (α-Vir) doesn't rise until nearly three o'clock in the morning and is only crossing the meridian by sunrise. The article doesn't make sense even by its own definition -- if the sun is in Virgo in August/September than Virgo is most prominent at opposition in February/March. (It's now a month later again, due to precession of the equinoxes).
The Sun doesn't "hang on the southern cross" in December. The Southern Cross is about as far from the ecliptic as you can get, so the sun never goes next nor near it in December, or any other time of year.
I've never heard of Orion's belt being called "the three kings". But the bible apparently doesn't mention three kings anyway -- they are referred to as "wise men", and no number is given. While we're at it, the homophonic play on "sun god" and "son of god" only works in English ... invented more than a thousand years after the events allegedly described. Christmas wasn't originally on December 25th -- the earliest known date for it is January 6th, and that's still the date in some eastern churches. Early Christianity probably intentionally co-opted the solstice festival much later.
The whole thing sounds like a bad script for a Discovery Channel "documentary".
Oh wait ...0 -
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Just to labour the point one more time ...
here's Orion tonight at 9pm, just after Sirius rises:
And here it is at midnight:
This alleged alignment intersects the horizon at about 123 degrees (measured anticlockwise from North) at 9pm. At midnight it has shifted to about 154 degrees. (All measurements very approximate since there is a spherical projection going on whose details I'm not sure of). In the course of the night, the pointer pirouettes over a hundred degrees around the horizon. The azimith of sunrise tomorrow (Christmas, the 25th) is 130 degrees. There's simply nothing special about this arrangement tonight or any other night. Not nearly, not roughly, not at all. The idea was put forward in a nutty 2007 movie, having been borrowed from some astrology faker.
Sorry for being so pointed. I think I'm just finally getting tired of paying for the Sky "science" channels when most of what they show is quackery, fakery and new age hogwash masquerading as documentaries. No wonder people are so credulous these days!0 -
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Im sorry you had to spend so much on this for nothing really, we all believe different things, nobody has any facts to repute one another, I was merely giving my version of event as I see it through what i've always heard (and thats way before 2007) and so to me Sirius is that bright star described in the Bible. If you prefer to believe that there was a magic star and 3 kings, donkeys and the the lot I have no objections!
I didn't say I believed in a magic star and three kings and donkeys. I just said that your astronomical claims are wrong.
What do you mean nobody has any facts? It's a fact that the claimed alignment of the "three kings" stars with Sirius doesn't exist and doesn't point to the sunrise on December 25th. It doesn't point to anything because it keeps moving. Sorry if I didn't explain it very well. Here it is again:
That's a picture of what the sky looks like right now (well, ok, 2 hours ago).I don't know how much more factual you can get than being able to go outside your door and see that right this very second (except the "alignment" will have moved 2 hours even further west). It's not a question of what anyone believes, unless you doubt the evidence of your own eyes. If it's cloudy tonight, check tomorrow -- it'll be the same.
P.S. I checked what it looks like for all locations in the northern hemisphere, in case the "magic alignment" is to do with where Sirius rises above the horizon, which would of course be latitude dependent. No dice -- the sun always rises at a more southerly azimuth than Sirius.0 -
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I'm afraid we're going around in circles. Every time I point out that there isn't any alignment at all, you keep saying it's "rough" or "inaccurate". It's not rough. It's not inaccurate. It's non-existent. If you think there's an actual alignment, would you mind saying what you think it is?
You've now posted a pic of that rough line about 3 times, i cant say much more
- and wont. Peace!
Edit: Just watched that 2007 Documentary which has been mention and its clear they are huge discrepancy but nothing surprising for that type of video. Im still on the idea that the bright star is Sirius!0 -
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The amount of people who point to it as fact quite beggars belief.
I know ... 2.30 billion Christians in the world. Would you believe that, would ya? Point made?
Beside the "joke" - no one knows for sure where all this is coming from but as the OP suggest, astronomy played a big part in the founding of many religious belief. And of course it would, its still today a subject of unknown, fascination and intrigue. I feel very fortunate that we today have the tools to observe in great detail all these stars and object from above.0 -
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im invisible wrote: »Does the line point to not where the sun rises, but to where the sun is, like if you follow the line around through dawn, would it end up pointing to where the sun rises?
(would this mean it points north south at midnight?) i have very little idea about these things,
Interesting question, but the answer is no. I say that with qualification though, because it's a difficult line to draw. Firstly, Sirius has already set several hours before sunrise on December 25th. Secondly, and more problematically, if you're going to draw a line on the spherical surface of the celestial sphere, what projection are you going to use?
For an example, see this guy:
http://www.tracer345.org/zeitgeist.html
He makes pretty much all the points I made (but I promise I didn't copy them -- I've only just come across the page ). He has two slight mistakes though. One is minor and doesn't affect the argument -- he says that the solstices occur at opposite ends of the major axis of the earth's elliptical orbit around the sun when the pole is tilted toward or away from the sun. That's wrong. The solstice is indeed related to the tilt of the earth's axis, but that is completely unconnected with its position in its orbit*.
The other point he makes, which is related to your question, is that the line from Orion's belt through Sirius never points at the sun. That's not really true either. What I think he has done is to take a flattened projection in which the celestial north pole is at the centre. In such a projection, our famous alignment is more or less tangential to the ecliptic line, so yes, it never points at the sun. The problem is that there are many different projections you could take. Even when you look at the actual sky, you are creating one mentally. We don't actually perceive the "dome of the sky" as a hemispheric dome above our heads -- we tend to accentuate angles close to the horizon and diminish them close to the zenith. That's why we have the so-called moon illusion, which causes us to see the moon as a large disc when it's close to the horizon and a smaller disc when it's overhead. Our senses evolved to tell us how near or far something was -- not to objectively measure angular dimensions.
In spherical coordinates, a straight line would normally be taken to mean a "great circle" line -- a line that is a circumference of the sphere. On our standard picture of the earth (and the sky) lines of longitude are great circles, but lines of latitude (other than the equator) are not. If you flatten the earth's surface to two dimensions, as we normally do on maps, it's quite difficult to figure out where a great circle line would lie, since it depends on the projection used to draw the map, and there are many different types of projections, but normally a great circle line would be some sort of curve.
All of which is a longwinded way to say -- there's no easy way to confirm or refute an alignment in which the Orion-Sirius line "points at" the sun. Without more detail such an alignment doesn't really mean anything. It's unlikely the ancients would have been referring to genuine spherical coordinates. They didn't have tools like quadrants to take angular measurements -- those were invented by Arabic atronomers in the late first millenium. The most important angular measurements were between the horizon and zenith, because this is how you measure the altitude of the Pole Star, a vital aid to navigation which gives your latitude. At the most basic, you can measure this with your hand held at arms length with your fingers parallel to the horizon. In my experience, hillwalkers still use this to roughly measure the time to sunset -- one finger from sun to horizon is about fifteen minutes. Early astronomers/navigators formalised this with the unit of the issabeh (Arabic for finger) which was the distance between knots on a piece of string use for measuring the altitude of Polaris. But for measuring large angles that do not lie along a meridian, this technique isn't so great. In short, this isn't the sort of alignment claimed for Orion, Sirius and the Sun.
(* Without getting into boring detail, at the solstice the earth does nowadays happen to be within a fortnight of reaching one end of the major axis of its orbit. It reaches perihelion, it's closest point to the sun, around January 4th. But the relationship of perihelion to the solstice -- called the "longitude of periapsis" -- is variable over time due to something called apsidal precession).0
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