Article (blog post)- 1700 words
- Level: all audiences
According to various sources, especially on the internet, the sky of September 2017 would re-present the scene from the twelfth chapter of Revelation—a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars—as the sun, moon, and certain planets arranged themselves within and around the constellation Virgo. This was supposed to be an unprecedented phenomenon. Christopher Graney analyzes these claims in this post on the Vatican Observatory’s The Catholic Astronomer blog. Graney argues that when we have an understanding of the motions of the sun, moon, and planets, and of what stars make up a constellation, we see in the sky of September 2017 something that happens every few hundred years, and that is of limited interest to astronomers.
Click here to access this article from The Catholic Astronomer, the official blog of the Vatican Observatory Foundation.
