In New York: The Starry Road to Twelfth Night

By James Wilde

The great dark vault beneath the dome of New York City's Hayden Planetarium is thick with silence. Schoolchildren who a moment ago were babbling and twitching like a flock of noisy starlings now sit jammed in their seats, motionless, their young eyes straining to see. Suddenly the ebony hemisphere above them gleams with fire: the planets, their satellites and some 4,000 stars begin marching across the heavens toward day break. The audience sucks in its breath. A child grabs the arm of the teacher next to her as she stares at the sky. For it really seems that the skin of the dome has been silently folded back to reveal the universe. There is the illusion of floating weightlessly out into space, secure in one's armchair, to join the nearest shining astral bodies, 25 trillion miles away.

What everyone is seeing is a replica of the changing sky over Bethlehem 2,000 years ago from Christmas to Twelfth Night (Jan. 6), when the Magi finally reached Bethlehem. In the east, the radiant star the Magi followed hovers over the stable of an inn, part of a panoramic view of the biblical country side that circles the auditorium.

A distant voice booms a question. What kind of star could the Magi have followed? Was it a comet? An exploding meteorite? A stella nova? Or perhaps the conjunction in the winter sky of three luminous planets, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars? Every 800 years they come so close together that they might appear to be some giant star in the dusk. The voice hints at a possible answer to the mystery of what lured the Magi on by explaining that just such a meeting occurred in the sky over the Holy Land in the early spring of the year 6 B.C. "Or was it truly a miracle star," the voice concludes, "a star of stars, seen just once in the history of man? Astronomy has taken us as far as it can go. The final decision is yours alone."

Now, from the star of stars, a broad tail of light drops from the sky through the rough timbers of the broken-down stable. It illuminates Mary and the Babe. A child in the audience slides out of her chair and drops to her knees. The lights go up, and the Hayden Planetarium's 44th annual holiday show is over.

Most of the audience, aged six to eleven, cannot remember a time when satellites were not shuttling through space. Not visions of sugar plums dance in their heads but Darth Vader's star fighters. "It was cool," says a nine-year-old Chinese girl, adding: "They said it was all a scientific thing." A small black boy asks, "Hey man, who do you think runs this place, the Wiz?"

Mark Chartrand, the owlish chairman of the Hayden Planetarium, is happy to unmask the manipulative strings attached to this particular wizard, a machine resembling a fat steel dumbbell, a monster with 9,000 eyes that moves eerily above the darkened floor of the planetarium. Explains Chartrand: "The machine moves the sun across the sky and accurately reproduces the movements both of the stars and the planets. In a sense it is a machine that can virtually take you any place in any time." The big steel dumbbell is a German-made Zeiss planetarium projector, 12 ft. high weighing 5,500 lbs., with 27,000 parts. Images are beamed up from the two large spheres at either end of the projector. Its control booth, situated at the edge of the auditorium, looks like the cockpit of a spaceship. A three-panel console has 150 buttons and 70 knobs. To bring out a star, the operator pushes two black buttons simultaneously and turns a rheostat marked STAR.

Often as not, the men who hold the stars in their places are Jon Bell, an intern studying to be a planetarium director, and Joe Doti, engineer. Except for the subdued glow from green and red console lights, they work in darkness. "It only takes a few weeks to learn how to operate, but you must know the basics of astronomy," says Bell. He is whispering as the display goes on, and his tone suggests an acolyte trying not to disturb a service. Every time he does a show, he admits, he feels a shiver synapsing down his spine. "It's something I cannot explain exactly. You have to work to keep a sense of perspective. Sometimes you feel like God."

At Bell's command, the machine can re-create the exact movements of the stars for an entire day in just 30 seconds and rearrange the sky in under a minute. It can perfectly duplicate the heavens visible from any hemisphere, taking the audience from New York to the South Pole and back up to the other side of the North Pole--all without stopping for lunch and in about 40 seconds. Bell is almost giddy as he lets the machine tumble time back to the reign of Herod and thence to the Adoration of Christ.

The spectral recorded voice has changed little since the first show in December 1935. Kenneth Franklin, a friendly badger of a man, wrote the present script. Of course "we can never change the ending," he chuckles. "We're locked into a great tradition."

Explaining the alien machine does not explain away the mystery. Astronomers agree that the brief conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn and Mars known to have occurred in 6 B.C. could have been the Star of the Three Wise Men. It might, therefore, mark the real time of Christ's birth, which considerable evidence, both historical and calendrical, tends to put some years before the year now known as A.D. 1. There is a slight complication, however. That star would not have been visible to most people in the Holy Land. For at that time of year, astronomers also know, the three planets were above the horizon only during the day, when they were invisible to the naked eye. Still, the Magi might have known about the daytime confluence. Most courts, even then, had astronomers perfectly capable of plotting the course of such bright and dramatic planets through the night sky and noting where their paths would cross during the day. Such a celestial coming together would likely be regarded as a portent of great events. Even here, though, the returns of science seem to be contradictory. Chinese and Korean astronomers noted that an extremely brilliant 70-day stellar flare-up was visible in the Eastern Hemisphere around 5 B.C., one of only six recorded in our galaxy. Could this have been the Wise Men's star?

Such speculation is innocently brushed aside: "I believe Jesus was found under a star," a little girl says as the crowd trudges out of the auditorium and into the grimy streets. "I think all stars belong to God."

--James Wilde

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