I am back in Ohio and home after 12-weeks helping my daughter to get back on her feet after major surgery. You will be glad to know that I am busy working on additional illustrations for Unraveling the Christmas Star Mystery. I was notified there were thousands of requests for a hard copy book and decided to create one in paperback. The revision will correct a few errors created when the original was changed to electronic format. It will have at least one illustration for each of the astronomical events and additional illustrations for other sections of the book. That will make the data presented easier to understand. I am setting the target print date for late spring, hopefully by May 2012.
The illustrations will be more easily viewed in the hard copy. The book, in that format, will make an excellent gift book and one which may be often pulled from your bookshelf as you reread the wonders God created. It will be a great reference for the astronomy of the Christmas star events.
Many people have told me they had wondered why such a fantastic event of the birth of Jesus Christ had only one "star". The documentation in the Holy Bible refers only to the marker "star" reported to Herod by the traveling visitors searching for the holy site. I've thought long and hard about why the other events were not mentioned. What I came up with is the supposition that it wasn't necessary for Herod or others (not involved in astronomy) to learn about all the precursor events leading up to the position marker for the birth site. If Herod and his advisors were that ignorant of the marker "star," they may not have understood the significance of the other happenings anyway. Perhaps, if he had known the true importance of Jesus Christ on Earth as told through the prior celestial events, he would have made earlier and more emphatic attempts to kill the Christ Child.
Our Heavenly Father did announce the birth of his Son majestically prior to the positioning of Saturn moving above Bethlehem. What is such a wonder to everyone is that it was planned and arranged at the creation of the universe. God knew what needed to be accomplished for the priests, scientists, and astronomers of that time to understand that the only God to be born on Earth, Jesus Christ, was being brought into our physical realm. I can't imagine what this Earth would be like right now without having the presence of Jesus Christ and his teachings. We were truly blessed by God.