Researchers Say Van Gogh's 'The Starry Night' Shows the Pre-Dawn Sky of July 22, 1889

Researchers say they may have identified the specific night sky captured in Vincent van Gogh's "The Starry Night." A study published Oct. 22 in the journal Scientific Reports proposes that the painting shows the pre-dawn sky as seen around July 22, 1889, from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Van Gogh painted it.

The finding is notable because art historians have long believed the painting was made in June. The team suggests its results could support the idea that the work was actually completed in July. The sky they identified includes a waning crescent moon, Venus and the Hyades star cluster.

The question has a long history. Art historian Albert Boime and astronomer George Abell of UCLA began examining it in 1984, and astronomer Charles Whitney of Harvard University continued the work in later years. Their analyses did not agree, and no consensus emerged on which date the painted sky matched.

The new effort was led by Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, CEO of the South Korean robotic telescope company SLLAB and a Ph.D. candidate at Kyung Hee University's School of Space Research. "When they see a fragment of a starry sky, observational astronomers like me and amateur astronomers alike will want to solve the puzzle," Kim told Space.com. "I am simply someone who pursued that process a little more actively."

According to Kim, the team studied the painting astronomically, examined documents about Van Gogh's circumstances in July 1889, and carried out ecological and meteorological investigations. They reconstructed the historical night sky from the spot in Saint-Rémy where Van Gogh is said to have worked, using observational geometry.

For the comparison, the researchers used Procrustes analysis, a method that looks only at the shape of two sets of points. After aligning position, size and rotation, it gauges similarity from the leftover differences, known as residuals. Kim said this suited the task because a star cluster on a canvas may be drawn larger, smaller or slightly tilted compared with reality. It also let the team put numbers on what earlier studies had described only qualitatively as resembling a certain constellation.

Numbers alone were not decisive, Kim explained, since different constellations could fit to a similar degree. The team therefore checked whether the stars were actually in that part of the pre-dawn sky on the date, whether they fell within the painter's field of view, and whether the moon and Venus looked as they do in the painting. "It was the Hyades that satisfied all of these conditions," Kim said.

The researchers also turned to Van Gogh's letters. In April 1888, he wrote that he wanted to try painting a starry sky, just as he would paint a green meadow dotted with dandelions in daytime. In a letter from between late May and early June 1889, he described seeing the countryside from his window long before sunrise, with only a very large-looking morning star. Kim said this may indicate Van Gogh repeatedly watched the pre-dawn sky, though he acknowledged that linking the letters to the painting's timeline drew on "personal imagination" and does not definitively change its accepted history.

The paper also notes that leading art historians regard the painting as stylistically different from Van Gogh's other June works, raising further doubts about the date. "What we propose is the possibility that Vincent conceived the idea in June and completed the painting after July 22," Kim said, adding that further research in art history and conservation science could shed more light on the question.