RE: Re-evaluating the Star of Bethlehem, Part 3: "For we have seen his star in the east and have come to worship him." (featuring @vuyusile as author)
This is all very interesting.
But, here's why I don't think the Star of Bethlehem was an exoatmospheric phenomenon
After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. - Matthew 2:9
As the earth spins, any celestial object carves a ground track where a plumb line between it and the center of the earth intersects the earth's surface. No such object can designate a single point on the ground and "stop over a specific place". Further, without the ability to know where the center of the earth was or to compute a line from there to any celestial object, there was no way it could guide anyone in that era to a specific point on the ground.
No, whatever it was that looked like a star had to be in the atmosphere and relatively close to the ground. Picture a helicopter hovering just a mile above a city. How many blocks of uncertainty are there about what is immediately below it? Consider how that uncertainty grows as it climbs higher and higher in the sky.
This NASA animation of a coming solar eclipse ground track dramatizes how impossible it is for something in space to point to just one spot on the ground while the earth is turning - even if you have the ability to compute an accurate plumb line between them.
This is a great comment, and receives my up vote - small as its effect is. This is because your comment puts its finger on a key point of controversy in the story (it certainly was for me). I offer a point of view in the second last post of this series coming up. The key, as you rightly identify, has to be that what they saw appeared relatively close to the ground. Relatively as opposed to absolutely. Hope you stay on to engage!