This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: New research published in Scientific Reports finds that the sky in Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night" (1889) matches, in both observation and shape, the predawn sky over Saint-Rémy around July 22, 1889. In the early hours of that period, a waning crescent moon, Venus and the Hyades star cluster in Taurus appeared close together.
The study was carried out jointly by SLLAB, a South Korean space-science company, and the School of Space Research at Kyung Hee University. Astronomical readings of "The Starry Night" began with Albert Boime at UCLA (1984) and Charles Whitney at Harvard (1986). Because the two reached conflicting conclusions, however, neither displaced the prevailing religious and symbolic interpretations of the painting.
In the roughly 40 years since, no study has treated its sky with observational geometry. First author Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, CEO of SLLAB and a Ph.D. candidate at Kyung Hee University's School of Space Research, describes what drew him to the question. "To an observational astronomer, the cluster of stars in 'The Starry Night' is the Hyades in Taurus.
But the moment I read the earlier studies explaining it as Aries, I heard the painting calling to me." Having built many telescopes and spent years observing the night sky, the team judged Aries an unlikely source of inspiration for the painter. The research began with two field trips to France in 2019 and builds on Kim's popular-science book published in 2025, gathering additional evidence and extending it with quantitative data. The painting has conventionally been dated from a letter Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo around June 18, 1889.
Yet the waning gibbous moon of that period cannot account for the slender crescent in the painting. Around July 22, by contrast, the Hyades rose in the east alongside Venus, and the moon's shape was close to the crescent on the canvas. That date, however, 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 cicadas, the team proposes that the seizure began in late July. In Arles, the team verified the painter's field of view in "Starry Night over the Rhône" (1888) with photographs taken on site. In Saint-Rémy, they located the spot from which Van Gogh drew the landscape beneath "The Starry Night" and reconstructed his view from there.
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