Yıldızlı Gece’nin ardında gerçek bir yaz göğü mü var?

Most art historians place Vincent van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’ in mid-June 1889, relying on a letter in which the painter told his brother Theo he had begun a fresh starry-sky study. A team led by Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, an astronomer who founded a telescope firm in Seoul, now argues in Scientific Reports that the canvas records an actual sky seen shortly before sunrise on 22 July 1889. Kim doubted an earlier claim that the swirling stars belong to Aries, since that constellation would look too faint at dawn to catch a painter’s eye. His group linked them instead to the Hyades cluster in Taurus, scoring the match with a statistical method called Procrustes shape analysis, and narrowed down the date using the Moon’s phase and position along with Venus. Texas State University astronomer Donald Olson remains unconvinced: he argues that the narrow field of view the team assumed could not take in the hills and cliffs in the painting.