"The Appearance of the Star" by Giovanni Da Modena (1412)
The german astronomer Johannes Kepler proposed in 1604 that The Christmas Star followed by the 
Joe Raymond / AP
Grant Mathews, a Notre Dame astrophysicist, points at a computer generated demonstration of the night sky around the time of the birth of Jesus Christ: an unusual alignment of the sun, Jupiter, the Moon and Saturn aligned in the constellation Aries while Venus and Mars were in adjacent constellations.
Mathews believes The Three Magi were Zoroastrian astrologers who would have recognized the planetary alignment as a sign a powerful leader was born.
