The sky painted by Vincent Van Gogh in The Starry Night matches the sky in July of 1889, the year he immortalized the French horizon.
The iconic painting has conventionally been dated from a letter the artist wrote to his brother, Theo, around June 18th that year, but experts say the waning gibbous moon of that period can’t account for the slender crescent in the painting.
The new research bridging art and astronomy found that the sky in the painting matches—in both observation and shape—the pre-dawn sky over Van Gogh’s home in Saint-Rémy, France, around July 22, 1889.
It featured a waning crescent moon, Venus, and the Hyades star cluster, all within the painter’s field of view, according to the first astronomical re-examination of the painting in four decades.
The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, was conducted jointly by space-science company SLLAB and the School of Space Research at Kyung Hee University in South Korea.
Astronomical readings of The Starry Night began with American scientists Albert Boime, in 1984, and Charles Whitney in 1986. But, because the two reached conflicting conclusions, neither displaced the prevailing religious and symbolic interpretations of the painting.
“To an observational astronomer, the cluster of stars in The Starry Night is the Hyades in Taurus,” said study first author Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim.
“But the moment I read the earlier studies explaining it as Aries, I heard the painting calling to me.”
Having built several telescopes and spent years observing the night sky, the Korean team judged that the Aries constellation was an unlikely source of inspiration for the painter.
The research began with two field trips to France in 2019 and builds on a book by Kim, published in 2025, gathering additional evidence and extending it with quantitative data.
He said that around July 22, 1889, the Hyades rose in the east alongside Venus, and the moon’s shape was close to the crescent on the canvas. But that date has long been assumed to fall within one of Van Gogh’s seizures.
By cross-analyzing the original French and Dutch letters, contemporary weather records and the letters’ remarks on cicada insects, the research team propose that the seizure began in late July.
In the French village of Arles, the team used photographs taken on site to verify the Impressionist’s field of view in another painting—Starry Night over the Rhône, from 1888.
In Saint-Rémy, they located the spot from which Van Gogh drew the landscape on canvas before adding paint to The Starry Night and reconstructed his view from there.
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Procrustes shape analysis, a statistical method for comparing and aligning shapes, then confirmed the correspondence between the five central stars of The Starry Night and the Hyades, with an even closer match in the pen drawing Van Gogh made after the painting.
The researchers say their results suggest that the sky in the painting was grounded in actual observation rather than pure imagination.
Using the same method, the team also proposes that the stars in Van Gogh’s 1888 painting Café Terrace at Night may be the Summer Triangle.
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“I hope this work prompts a renewed, multidisciplinary look at the sequence and working methods of the Saint-Rémy paintings,” said Kim, CEO of SLLAB and a doctoral candidate at Kyung Hee University.
“Our conversation with Van Gogh’s other skies is still ongoing. We plan to tell those stories one by one.”
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