SOUTH KOREA, Oct. 22, 2026
Research published in Scientific Reports, a Nature Portfolio journal, finds that the sky in Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night (1889) matches, in both observation and shape, the pre-dawn sky over Saint-Rémy around 22 July 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 18 June 1889. Yet the waning gibbous moon of that period cannot account for the slender crescent in the painting. Around 22 July, 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-analysing 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. Procrustes shape analysis then confirmed the correspondence between the five central stars of The Starry Night and the Hyades, with an even closer match in the pen drawing Van Gogh made after the painting. These results suggest that the sky in the painting was grounded in actual observation rather than pure imagination. Using the same method, the team also proposes that the stars in Café Terrace at Night (1888) may be the Summer Triangle.
"I hope this work prompts a renewed, multidisciplinary look at the sequence and working methods of the Saint-Rémy paintings, and at Van Gogh's movements that summer," Kim said. "Our conversation with Van Gogh's other skies is still ongoing. We plan to tell those stories one by one."
The article "The actual sky of Van Gogh's Starry Night: a multidisciplinary reconstruction" is authored by Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, Suna Kang, Jungwoo Song and Ho Jin. Scientific Reports (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-73025-5
Code and data: GitHub sllabinc/StarryNight; Zenodo 10.5281/zenodo.21175816
About SLLAB, Inc.: Founded in 2000, SLLAB is a South Korean company that designs and builds robotic telescopes of up to 2.0 m in aperture, equipped with precision tracking solutions for astronomical and satellite observation. The company operates its own manufacturing plant, test facilities and research institute.
About the School of Space Research, Kyung Hee University: The School conducts education and research across space exploration science, including space payload development, space weather theory and modelling, satellite observation data analysis, and space exploration and mission design.
