Well the rapture was a separate issue from Revelation 12 at least for this thread, though the events described therein may well include the rapture of the saints.
I slept on it over night and when I awoke it occurred to me that if there is any direct correlation with the constellation alignments(never mind most of the 9 main sequence Leo stars being binary) on September 23rd it may not be anything to do with the rapture or Israel or ‘rescue’ per se at all. (yeah playing the D-—l’s advocate here...so forgive me) You see while most of the chapter deals with the Woman...there is that little matter of Satan being thrown down via the war in heaven with Michael and the other angels..... do you see where I’m going with this? There is nothing that says this doesn’t have to happen before the trib or even the rapture....but such an event would start to accelerate the growth of evil to Days of Noah levels with unprecedented world wide growth of persecution with particularly pernicious hot spots. Will grace grow stronger as evil abounds more and more? Will certain saints start to be equipped with power enough to fight off the worst onslaughts Satan and his demons can muster? Who can say...
So what if September 23 2017 marks the day Satan and his minions are locked down upon this Earth... if that is the Portent of the sign of the Woman? They still won’t be able to do what they want until the “Restrainer” is taken off the Earth....but evil may still well accelerate. Can they seduce the Northern powers to destroy Israel to nullify God’s promise and therefore destroy the power of his Word?....Ezekiel 38 speaks of one such attempt and what happens to the Earthly power that attempts it. Just a thought....I do believe it hasn’t happened yet, this throwing down of Satan...or it may be in process now! But I believe the fullness of it comes to fruition prior to the latter 3.5 years.
I too have noted that little item concerning that patch of sky near Virgo being blotted out of various astronomical data bases at NASA and Stellarium. There is a lot of confused chatter and its not the first time I had been hearing of such a cover up. Stories of persons being threatened with arrest....some stories about edicts being issued for astronomers to keep their mouths shut....some folks dying mysteriously....yet nothing solid yet but a bunch of whispers and rehashed, recirculated myth and speculations...and lots of photoshop jpegs. Well Revelation speaks of a couple of major asteroid hits, sky falls of ice blocks 100 lbs or more mixed with fire and brimstone, the Earth’s spin increasing by a third to 1333 miles per hour(as we lose 8 hours) and the loss of moon light....so something majorly astronomical may be in the works. Planet X?, Nibiru, ?(with accompanying asteroids and comets) I’m not closed to the notion...!
A clue: all the Bible translations prior to the Rheims use the term ‘the departure’ in translating 2 Thess 2 ‘apostasia’.
. . . We then compare Luke’s verb in Acts 1 to John’s verb in Rev 12 and note that the man-cild in the Apocalypse is snatched/rescued while in Luke Christ is leaving on his own timing after his patient exhortation to the disciples.