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Notes
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On (or about) 18 June 1889, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo that he had a new painting of a starry sky. This was
The Starry Night
. At that time Vincent was a patient at the
Saint-Paul Asylum
at
Saint-Rémy-de-Provence
in France. The image is a planetarium (
Stellarium
software) view of the night sky in the southeast at four o'clock that morning. The exact date he made the painting is not known, but given the speed with which he worked it's quite possible he had made it earlier the same morning.
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Vincent normally liked to work directly from nature. But the circumstances of his stay at the asylum made that impossible. He had a ground floor studio where he worked by day. But his bedroom was on the first floor with a window facing directly east (not southeast). He was allowed to draw here, but not to paint. He was thus obliged to work from sketches. The window was barred and so his field of view was somewhat restricted as a result. As for the village, that lay due south and could not be seen from his bedroom.
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Venus
lies directly East in the constellation
Aries
and at this date was pretty nearly as bright as it gets. The
Moon
lying in
Aquarius
70 degrees to the right, i.e. nearly at right angles, would have been difficult to see from the barred window. It phase was then 63% waning, i.e. more than half of it visible and certainly not a crescent moon.
Jupiter
in
Sagitttarius
was also present in the morning sky, but too far to the right (in fact lying behind Vincent's field of view) for him to see. In the days preceding the moon was even fuller and more to the right, and thus could not have been seen by Vincent. Sketches he prepared before 18 June must therefore have been made at towards the end of May when the Moon was rising in the east, or else his painting of the Moon was done entirely from the imagination.
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The brightest star visible would have been
Capella
about 45 degrees to the left of Venus at a height slightly above that of Venus. Between them the
Pleiades
, a fuzzy star cluster known to everyone as the
Seven Sisters
, would have been notable at about 15 degrees to the left of Venus and slightly below. If Vincent had known where to look for it, the
Andromeda Galaxy
was in his line of sight, lying directly east at an elevation of about 45 degrees (slightly above the limit of the view shown here). However this is only ever seen as a faint patch of haze by the naked eye in a dark sky and he would have been unlikely to have glimpsed it at this time.
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Venus and the Moon were roughly in the configuration shown in the painting four days later on the morning of 22 June with the Moon in
Pisces
about 30 degrees to the right of Venus, both lying directly East and in clear view from Vincent's window. The phase of the moon would then have been 30% waning, a fat crescent much as in the painting. However, the depiction of the moon is mannered in the painting as a crescent moon can never have the inturning cusps depicted. Before this, Vincent would have been able to see Venus together with a crescent Moon rising together about this time on the morning of 26 May. This would have been an especially pretty sight as they were then within ten degrees of each other. There is no mention of this, however, in Vincent's letters.
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