Vincent Van Gogh (1853-90) was an artist and accidental astronomer. He painted flowers, landscapes, people, and occasionally the night sky. He apparently had an illness that affected his hearing and his eyesight. Weak sounds were loud to him. He could see dim lights that were invisible to others. Bright lights seemed to have halos around them. He painted whatever he looked at in the way that it appeared to him. One of his works, "The Starry Night", was painted in 1889. It depicts the night sky over Arles, France. Since Van Gogh painted everything accurately, anyone with a computer astronomy program can duplicate the exact summer night and hour when Venus and the crescent moon were in the places where Van Gogh saw them. It was early in the morning just before sunrise, further evidenced by the horizon sunrise glow beyond the hills to the east. Over the years, many people have wondered about the swirling lights in the sky. I puzzled about that also, until I saw an electromagnetic radiation map of our milky way galaxy compiled by Australian astronomers around the middle of the past century. It was an exact overlay of Van Gogh's swirling night sky with the double helix structure. The problem I had at first was that the time of that conjunction between Venus and the crescent moon was not in the direction of our galaxy center. After some time and thought, I realized that Van Gogh began his painting earlier in the evening shortly after sunset when the center of our galaxy was directly above the town of Arles. He added the moon and Venus shortly after they rose above the eastern horizon early in the morning. There are probably many people in this world who have seen Van Gogh's swirling milky way in the summer skies they have known all their life. They assume everyone else can see the same thing. I would like to know how many people have witnessed this wonder.
Van Gogh, starry night astronomer
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