Researchers believe that the image depicted in Vincent van Gogh’s iconic painting “The Starry Night” did not come from the artist’s imagination, but from an actual night sky in 1889.
A South Korean team reported Thursday that they have matched van Gogh’s masterpiece to the sky just before dawn over France’s Saint-Remy de Provence on July 22, 1889, The Associated Press reported.
The team was led by Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, the CEO of South Korean robotic telescope company SLLAB, according to Space.com. Kim’s team was following up on research that began in 1984 by art historian Albert Boime and astronomer George Abell and was continued by Harvard University astronomer Charles Whitney, the website reported.
The studies did not come to a consensus about when the sky matched painting, Space.com reported.
The July 22 date is about a month later than the time frame that has been accepted by art historians for decades, according to the AP. The painting, created by van Gogh at a French asylum, depicts a crescent moon and Venus surrounded by a sky of swirling stars.
Researchers think they might have pinpointed the exact night sky that we see depicted in Vincent van Gogh's iconic painting "The Starry Night." https://t.co/p93x5VPI9s
— SPACE.com (@SPACEdotcom) October 22, 2026
“When they see a fragment of a starry sky, observational astronomers like me and amateur astronomers alike will want to solve the puzzle,” Kim told Space.com. “I am simply someone who pursued that process a little more actively.”
Kim told the website that his team used a combination of documents about the artist’s situation in July 1889 and “carried out ecological and meteorological investigations.” The also analyzed the sky from the location of the asylum in Saint-Rémy, then followed up with observational geometry to map the historical night sky.
“Modern telescopes are equipped with a function called astrometry, which compares an image of the night sky with celestial coordinates stored in a computer and automatically extracts the coordinates of the image,” Kim told Space.com. “We used Procrustes analysis, a method that compares only the ‘shape’ of two sets of points.
“Because a star cluster on the canvas may be larger or smaller than in reality and slightly tilted, this method was the right fit. It allowed us to explain, in quantitative terms, what earlier studies had described only qualitatively as ‘resembling a certain constellation,’” Kim told the website. “We also checked whether the stars were actually in that part of the pre-dawn sky on that date, whether they fall within the painter’s field of view, and whether the appearance of the moon and Venus matches the painting. It was the Hyades that satisfied all of these conditions.”
In an email to the AP, Kim said that “no two skies are the same.”
“Something always changes. I believe Vincent noticed those changes and put them into the painting,” Kim told the news organization. “I am confident that July 22 is the better date. I will bet on this date.”
Despite all his research, Kim has never seen “The Starry Night” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, according to the AP.
“Now that the paper is out, I really have to go and see ‘The Starry Night’ in person, don’t I?” he said.
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