For a surprisingly long time, scientists have debated whether Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night was his fantasy, a symbolic representation, or an actual astronomical observation. Also surprisingly, many astronomers favored the latter, specifically that the painting depicted the night sky in June 1889.

But a study published today in Scientific Reports challenges that theory—and again, not in the direction you’d expect—and argues that The Starry Night likely represents the celestial arrangements of the sky before dawn on July 22, 1889. In what the team calls a project in “forensic astronomy,” the researchers studied astronomical simulations, historical weather records, and star positions, as well as van Gogh’s own letters from the time.…