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Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” may have been based on one specific night sky: July 22, 1889, just before dawn over France.

If that’s true, it means the famous painting was based on real observations, not just van Gogh’s imagination, astronomer Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim and colleagues report October 22 in Scientific Reports .

“How could an invented sky fit the sky of a particular date this closely?” the team writes. “Observation and imagination have commonly been treated as an either/or, yet ‘The Starry Night’ shows the two coexisting on one canvas.”

Art historians typically date “The Starry Night” to mid-June 1889, based on one of van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo.

“At last I have a landscape with olive trees, and also a new study of a starry sky,” van Gogh wrote on or about June 18. About a month earlier, van Gogh had entered a hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France.…