Art meets astronomy. A new study in Scientific Reports says the sky in Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” matches the pre-dawn sky seen from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence around July 22, 1889, Space.com reports.
What they found
- The painting shows a waning crescent moon, Venus and a cluster of stars. The team, led by Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim (CEO of robotic telescope company SLLAB and a PhD candidate at Kyung Hee University), says the cluster is the Hyades in Taurus.
- Earlier attempts to date the sky, starting with art historian Albert Boime and astronomer George Abell at UCLA in 1984 and followed by Charles Whitney at Harvard, didn’t agree with each other.
- Kim’s team used a method called Procrustes analysis that compares only the “shape” of two sets of points after matching position, size and rotation. They also checked whether the stars were actually in that part of the pre-dawn sky on that date, whether they fell within Van Gogh’s field of view, and whether the moon and Venus matched. Only the Hyades met all of those conditions.
- The catch: art historians have long thought Van Gogh painted it in June, a month earlier. The researchers suggest their result could support the idea that it was actually painted in July. That’s a suggestion, not a settled fact.
- Van Gogh wrote as early as 1888 about his desire to paint a star-filled sky.
My take
I love that a swirling, emotional painting turns out to be anchored to a real sky. A telescope maker and a stack of old letters can still surprise us about a painting everyone thought they knew. Next time you’re out before dawn and Venus is up, look for the moon beside it. The heavens have been putting on the show all along, and as the Psalmist said, “The heavens declare the glory of God.”
Have a blessed day! And Happy Hacking!
