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"The Moon is moving."

With those four words, a young doctoral candidate sets into motion Mankind's greatest journey of discovery, both on the physical and the spiritual planes. He and his fellow-future-astronomer pal discover that the Moon's movement is causing a location on its surface, which just happens to coincide with that of the BIG EYE telescope, to constantly face a point in space approximately 1,000 light-years away. Up on the Moon, the Director of Lunar Operations, Derek Thompson, along with Dr. Samuel Vance, a rather odd, but brilliant scientist, are immediately intrigued with the young astronomers' discovery. This is due to an earlier, eerily similar episode when the BIG EYE itself had slewed un-commanded to view a previously undiscovered black hole, exactly 16.5 light-years away. At that time, using advanced technical analysis and pioneering manipulative techniques, they had used the newly discovered black hole to view the Earth exactly 33 years in the past, when the both of them had been born. Coincidences mount as Thompson discovers that only five other people in the entire world share 5 AM, December 25, 1999 as the moment of their births.

Thompson decides that he needs to bring all of these highly intelligent and accomplished individuals together to investigate what has the Moon and his beloved BIG EYE telescope misbehaving. When none of them is able to journey to the Moon, Director Thompson has them all gather at Houston's Johnson Space Center to help discover what is going on. He is fairly certain that yet another black hole is at the end of the 1000 light-year vector that the BIG EYE has been forced to set its sights upon. And he immediately takes a leap of faith that there is only one birth that might be worth seeing after light takes that two-thousand-year-round trip. As a Christian, he has hopes that working together, all of them will be able to get the BIG EYE's resolution refined enough to witness the actual birth of Jesus Christ, 2000 years in the past.
Michael Farber, one of the chosen Christmas born, is the computer programmer whose pioneering work makes just about everything possible in the investigation of the phenomenon. But he isn't buying into any spiritual connection. And like him, not everyone else on Earth, nor even among the other chosen participants, is all too happy with Thompson's hopeful scenario.

Nor, apparently, are the forces that caused the BIG EYE to slew un-commanded... or the Moon to mysteriously move in the first place. A number of complications, both on a mundane human level and on a grandiose cosmic scale, arise almost immediately, making Director Thompson's wishful outcome highly unlikely. Michael has no problem with that result, but still does his best to bring their investigation to some conclusion. Unfortunately, no matter how hard they all try, it appears that the elite group of scientists will be unable to let the world witness the Divine birth.

But sometimes, even in failure comes success. Or at least understanding...