Van Gogh may have painted a real night sky — astronomers have found its date: July 22, 1889

For 137 years, 'The Starry Night' has been read as a dreamscape. Now astronomers at Kyung Hee University and the South Korean space-science company SLLAB say the sky over Saint-Rémy, France, matches a real predawn sky: around July 22, 1889, when a waning crescent moon, Venus and the Hyades star cluster in Taurus sat close together exactly where Van Gogh painted them. Using a shape-matching method, the team confirmed the painting's five central stars as the Hyades. 'To an observational astronomer, the cluster is the Hyades in Taurus,' says first author Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim. The finding, published in Scientific Reports, gently challenges the long-accepted mid-June dating drawn from a letter to his brother Theo.