In New York: The Starry Road to Twelfth Night

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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?"