About | BETLEMME ｜ Bird of Hope

De nobis

IHS Bethlehem Church is a nonprofit religious corporation registered in the State of California, USA.

It is a community of worship and faith, and it also counts observing, recording and publishing the sky among its activities. This site is a place to record both.

About the name

IHS comes from the first three letters of ΙΗΣΟΥΣ, Greek for “Jesus.” It is one of the oldest abbreviations, carved on church emblems and sacred vessels from the Middle Ages to today.

Betlemme is the Italian name for Bethlehem, the place the Magi from the East reached, guided by a star.

We choose old names not out of nostalgia, but as a reminder that the people who looked up at the sky two thousand years ago and we who look at the same sky today are doing the same thing.

What we do

There are three things.

The life of faith: worship, keeping records, and putting our thoughts into words.
Observation: through a project named Maryam, we search for asteroids and comets that no one has yet found. We are writing software that analyses publicly available sky images and automatically detects moving objects.
Openness: the code we write is published, together with the records of what did not work.

Why a church watches the stars

The two are often thought to be at odds, but history says otherwise.

Copernicus was a cathedral canon. Lemaître, who first proposed that the universe is expanding, was a priest. The Vatican has run an observatory for more than a hundred years and still observes under the dark skies of Arizona.

Faith and observation begin in the same place: looking up, and not assuming we already know.