According to some scholars, the Star of Bethlehem might have been a close encounter between Venus and Jupiter. The two brightest planets in the night sky, merged, would have made a spectacle of Biblical proportions. This Christmas, NASA's STEREO-B probe is observing a conjunction of three planets--Venus, Earth and Jupiter.
UPDATED: Instead of Jupiter and Venus merging, however, the combined planets are Jupiter and Earth:
UPDATED: Instead of Jupiter and Venus merging, however, the combined planets are Jupiter and Earth:
| IMAGE 22 December 2013  | UPDATED IMAGE 23 December 2013  |
Unlike conjunctions of the distant past, this one includes our home planet. STEREO-B is located on the far side of the sun where it can look back and see Earth along with other worlds in the Solar System. Only NASA's twin STEREO probes, equipped with their high dynamic-range Heliospheric Imagers, can witness this kind of conjunction.
From STEREO-B's point of view, Earth and Jupiter are less than 0.5 degrees apart, while all three planets fit in a circle 3 degrees in diameter. This meeting is not nearly as tight as the putative Star of Bethlehem conjunction ~2000 years ago. At that time Venus and Jupiter could have been as little as 6 arcseconds (0.00166 degrees) apart. Nevertheless, the ongoing conjunction is still a beauty. Stay tuned for updates as the three planets converge.
UPDATE: From STEREO-B's point of view, Earth and Jupiter are so close together that the spacecraft's Heliospheric Imager can barely tell the two apart. Venus is only 2 degrees from the Earth-Jupiter pair, so this is actually a 3-way conjunction. www.spaceweather.com
Notes: [Messenger Spirit]
In ancient Mesopotamia the planets were seen as gods in their own right. The planet Jupiter was known as Neberu (Nibiru?) and associated with the god Marduk. He was the patron god of Babylon, and considered equivalent to the older Sumerian god Enlil, the king of the gods, and hence associated with rulership and wisdom. In the Jewish cabbala, Jupiter is the fourth sphere, Mercy (Chesed). Chesed also lies on the pillar of creation between Chokmah (pure creative power) and Netzach (individualised images), representing archetypal ideas. http://www.skyscript.co.uk/jupitermyth.html
From STEREO-B's point of view, Earth and Jupiter are less than 0.5 degrees apart, while all three planets fit in a circle 3 degrees in diameter. This meeting is not nearly as tight as the putative Star of Bethlehem conjunction ~2000 years ago. At that time Venus and Jupiter could have been as little as 6 arcseconds (0.00166 degrees) apart. Nevertheless, the ongoing conjunction is still a beauty. Stay tuned for updates as the three planets converge.
UPDATE: From STEREO-B's point of view, Earth and Jupiter are so close together that the spacecraft's Heliospheric Imager can barely tell the two apart. Venus is only 2 degrees from the Earth-Jupiter pair, so this is actually a 3-way conjunction. www.spaceweather.com
Notes: [Messenger Spirit]
In ancient Mesopotamia the planets were seen as gods in their own right. The planet Jupiter was known as Neberu (Nibiru?) and associated with the god Marduk. He was the patron god of Babylon, and considered equivalent to the older Sumerian god Enlil, the king of the gods, and hence associated with rulership and wisdom. In the Jewish cabbala, Jupiter is the fourth sphere, Mercy (Chesed). Chesed also lies on the pillar of creation between Chokmah (pure creative power) and Netzach (individualised images), representing archetypal ideas. http://www.skyscript.co.uk/jupitermyth.html
Venus in myth is the goddess of love. In the Jewish Cabbala, Venus is the seventh sphere: Victory or Netzach. Situated at the base of the pillar of action, Netzach manifests the creative power in emotion and instinct, and all human creativity, both sexual and imaginative The latter includes the arts, and also the god-forms of polytheism, created by man in his own image, yet nevertheless reflecting something of the nature of the universe. Both desire and imagination are to some extent superficial. The term 'glamour' originally meant a magic illusion cast upon something, and the victory of Netzach involves triumphing over the glamour of its outer manifestations to reach that which they symbolise. An ancient text calls Netzach the Hidden Intelligence, "because its brilliant outpouring is received by those spiritual virtues which are seen, in the ecstasy of faith, only by the initiated".
http://www.skyscript.co.uk/venusmyth.html
http://www.skyscript.co.uk/venusmyth.html
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