delight
Van Gogh painted a real sky. Researchers just found the morning.
For decades the date was a guess. The moon disagreed.
The sky in Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night matches the real pre-dawn heavens over Saint-Rémy, France, around July 22, 1889, according to new research pairing art history with astronomy. The painting has long been dated to a June letter Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, but the slender crescent on the canvas does not match that period's waning gibbous moon. A team from the space-science company SLLAB and the School of Space Research at Kyung Hee University in South Korea instead found a waning crescent moon, Venus and the Hyades star cluster all within the painter's field of view that July morning. They used a statistical method called Procrustes shape analysis to line up the five central stars. The match was even closer in the pen drawing Van Gogh made afterward. "I heard the painting calling to me," said study author Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim. The team says it plans to decode his other skies one by one.
