Van Gogh’s Starry Night Matches a Real Sky Over Saint-Rémy, Study Says

The sky in Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night appears to show a real night, not just a feeling, according to a new study. Universe Today reported that the research points to a crescent Moon, Venus and the Hyades star cluster rising in the east, and to a different date than the one long assumed.

The work was carried out jointly by the South Korean telescope maker SLLAB and the School of Space Research at Kyung Hee University. It appears in Scientific Reports, a Nature journal.

An old debate about a famous sky

For more than a century and a half, scholars concentrated mainly on religious and symbolic readings of the painting, Universe Today reported. Astronomical studies arrived only in the mid-1980s, from UCLA art historian Albert Boime in 1984 and Harvard astronomer Charles Whitney in 1986. Both proposed constellation identifications based on a mid-June date, but they reached conflicting conclusions. According to the report, no study since had examined the painting using observational geometry.

The new study instead narrows down the dates on which a crescent Moon, Venus and the Hyades appeared close together within Van Gogh’s field of view, as they do in the painting.

Why the usual date does not fit

The painting has traditionally been dated to June 18, 1889, based on a letter Van Gogh wrote to his brother. On that date, however, the Moon was in its waning gibbous phase, which does not match the slender crescent on the canvas.

On July 22, the Moon was a crescent, and the Hyades would have been rising in the east alongside Venus, which places the scene in the constellation Taurus. That date was once thought to coincide with one of Van Gogh’s seizures. But the team compared the original French and Dutch letters and the details in both, and concluded that the seizure began in late July.

How the team checked the scene

Using photographs taken on site in Arles, the researchers verified Van Gogh’s field of view over the Rhône River. They then traveled to Saint-Rémy, where they located the spot from which he drew the landscape in preparation for the painting. A statistical shape analysis confirmed, they said, that the five central stars in the painting correspond to the Hyades cluster. The match was even closer in the pen drawing Van Gogh made after finishing the painting.

The study’s first author, Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, is CEO of SLLAB and a Ph.D. candidate at Kyung Hee University. He has spent years building telescopes and observing the night sky. He told the outlet that to an observational astronomer, the star cluster in the painting is the Hyades in Taurus, and that earlier explanations pointing to Aries did not sit right with him. The research builds on a book he released in 2025 and began with two field trips to France in 2019.

What it means for art and astronomy

The results suggest the sky in The Starry Night was based on actual observation rather than pure impressionist feeling. That changes how the painting can be read, and it may also affect how art historians sequence Van Gogh’s Saint-Rémy works, since a July date shifts when this one was made.

The same approach could be applied to other historical paintings of the night sky, Universe Today reported, opening the way for collaboration between astronomers and art historians. Kim said he hopes the work prompts a renewed, multidisciplinary look at the order and working methods of the Saint-Rémy paintings and at Van Gogh’s movements that summer.

What comes next

The team has already applied the method to another Van Gogh work with stars, Café Terrace at Night, painted in 1888. It found a possible match to the Summer Triangle asterism. Kim said the conversation with Van Gogh’s other skies is ongoing and that the team plans to tell those stories one by one.

Around Prague, based on reporting by Universe Today