A team of scientists recently used astronomy to date Vincent van Gogh's painting Lane of Poplars at Sunset. The painting depicts a street named Weverstraat, which ran through the center of the town of Nuenen in the Netherlands, on either November 13 or November 14, 1884. Donald Olson, the astronomer who led the team that made this discovery, has previously employed this method to date three of van Gogh's other works: Moonrise (Wheat Stacks), Road with Cypress and Star, and White House at Night.
Art can be wondrous in more ways than one. Take Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night, for instance. It's one of the most famous paintings in the world for its use of color and texture and its beautiful, swirling, flowing lines.
But upon closer analysis, it also displays a fascinating understanding of complex atmospheric physics that the famed artists would have had no way of studying. As compelling as the piece is, Starry Night isn't the only one of van Gogh's master works to have the eyes of the scientific world trained on it in the hopes of gathering more information about both painting and painter through in-depth analysis. In a research project published as a story in Sky & Telescope Magazine, a team lead by Donald Olson—astronomer and physics professor emeritus at Texas State University—figured out how to use astronomy to discover exactly what location is depicted in van Gogh's Lane of Poplars at Sunset.
This is a method that Olson has actually employed before, according...
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