How Astronomers and Art Historians Are Working Together to Identify the Inspiration Behind Famous Works of Art

How Astronomers and Art Historians Are Working Together to Identify the Inspiration Behind Famous Works of Art

Researchers study paintings and literature to uncover untold history of the works, sometimes finding themselves trying to discern celestial bodies from dust

In the spring of 2025, I fell into some art detective work. My mission was to go to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and get close to The Evening Star by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. The Evening Star—a nickname for Venus—joined several works not previously displayed in the United States, part of a Friedrich exhibition called “The Soul of Nature,” honoring the 250th anniversary of the artist’s birth. According to the museum’s description, Venus could be seen as “a tiny bright dot” barely visible above a cloud bank. In the painting, three figures stand on a hill outside Dresden, Germany, at sunset. A young boy at center, his back to the viewer, lifts his arms in exultation. But where was the star? The work’s title character seemed to be missing from prints and art books depicting The Evening Star.  

As a caver, I’m normally trying to solve mysteries deep in the earth. This unaccustomed aboveground task came to me, indirectly, from Don Olson, the astronomer and astrophysicist. In 2024, I’d casually met one of his research collaborators, Ava Pope, through her partner, Mike Newsome, both fellow caving enthusiasts. (The two often sponsored caver gatherings at their Virginia farm.) When Pope saw on social media that my wife, Kathy, and I were in New York for the weekend, she texted me. The exhibition would end in less than two months, and she explained that if I could find and photograph Venus, my images might help Olson unravel several mysteries: From what physical spot did Friedrich observe the scene? On what date? And who, for that matter, is the family depicted in the scene? I was determined to find out.

As I would learn, Olson and his students and collaborators have taken on a singular approach, finding new truths in paintings we thought we knew. 

---

Olson began using astronomy to investigate creative works in the 1980s at Texas State University, when an English professor asked him for help understanding complex astronomical passages in “The Franklin’s Tale,” one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. His astronomical research connected an abnormally high tide on the coast of Brittany—a major plot device in the story—to an extreme flood on December 19, 1340, which may have inspired the incident in Chaucer. Besides co-writing a paper about the various lines of evidence that led him to that date, Olson studied astronomical elements in a variety of other works: Claude Monet’s The Cliff, Étretat, Sunset (pinpointing the beach location where the artist stood); Vincent van Gogh’s White House at Night (the golden disk in the sky must be Venus around a sunset in June 1890, as opposed to sunrise, moonrise or moonset); Ansel Adams’ Autumn Moon (the remote and never-before-identified Yosemite location from which the photograph must have been taken); William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (whether the star in the opening scene is a planet, or Tycho’s supernova, or something else); Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (verifying that the “waking dream” she later described as inspiring her story happened on a moonlit evening in Switzerland on June 16, 1816); and historical events from ancient Rome (locating Julius Caesar’s first invasion of Britain) to World War II (explaining a disastrous tide for Marines landing at Tarawa in the Central Pacific). Olson realized that many dates and locations where artworks were made, even the very scenes they depicted, had been incorrectly reported in books and exhibitions, which often gave conflicting years and places. Olson felt certain these were errors he could fix by combining astronomical data with site visits and deep dives into historical records.

A lanky figure who often wears blue jeans and a Texas State shirt, Olson has long softened his exacting attention to detail with lectures that feature such examples, to make science less “terrifying” to his students. In basic physics classes, he has cast rainbows across the room to explain refraction; in honors-program classes, he has taken undergraduates to Yosemite, Switzerland and other far-flung locations, immersing them in unforgettable fieldwork.

In 2008, Pope, then an undergraduate physics major, took an honors course with Olson titled “Astronomy in Art, History and Literature.” The class changed her life. She partnered with students from other disciplines, she says, using their separate skill sets to find novel solutions to various mysteries. Pope’s first project was to find the dates when one could photograph sunset through a particular V-shaped geological formation in Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas. Olson gave her a puzzle to solve, and she was hooked.

Later in the semester, Olson handed Pope a print of Starry Night—the somewhat more realistic painting by Edvard Munch rather than the more famous one by van Gogh. He asked her to figure out when it was painted. Pope dove into the Munch assignment, calculating astronomical data for the Norwegian resort town of Asgardstrand, where Munch made the painting, a place she’d never visited. Most of the available information about the town’s history was printed in Norwegian, including an archived article from the newspaper Morgenbladet. It confirmed that Munch’s Starry Night had been cataloged in an early exhibition under another name, Abendstern, which, oddly enough, translates to “Evening Star.” Finding this alternate name clarified references to the painting in other historical documents, as well as in Munch’s own hand. It depicted an early evening scene. Importantly, Munch’s bright dot corresponded to the position of Jupiter. Venus was not visible in the sky he painted, and in the 19th century any bright planet after sunset might be called an “evening star.” This narrowed the earliest possible date to July 9, 1893; Munch’s travel records put September 24 as the latest. Weather records further narrowed the date to one of two evenings: August 16 or 23, both of which fit records Pope found for Abendstern. 

Impressed, Olson invited Pope to join him; his wife, Marilynn; and others on a research trip to Norway to conduct further investigations into the painting, along with The Storm and other Munch works. She eventually joined ten of Olson’s expeditions, becoming a co-author of six published research papers and appearing in all four of his books. “I created this whole astronomy nerd family,” Pope says of the colleagues she’s met while traveling. “[It’s been] two decades of friendship and research.”

One member of that family is Roger W. Sinnott, a senior editor at Sky & Telescope magazine, where Olson has published many of his results. In 2014, Olson collected some of these articles in Celestial Sleuth: Using Astronomy to Solve Mysteries in Art, History and Literature. More books followed. Celestial Sleuthing: More Mysteries in Art, History and Literature, fourth in the series (which includes a discussion of Friedrich’s The Evening Star), was published in January 2026. 

When approaching a new case, Olson asks four questions about each work examined: Where was the artist located? (Using such tools as computer regressions of lunar, solar and planetary movements combined with angles taken from geologic formations and surviving structures or trees, his group can sometimes determine the artist’s spot within a few feet.) When was the artist there? (Through combined astronomical and historical records, Olson seeks the year, month, day and time, down to the minute if possible.) Which way was the artist looking? (Toward the sky to the north, south, east or west, or toward some direction in between?) What appears in the sky? (For some projects, especially those involving the moon, the object is obvious and may appear in the work’s title, but for others, celestial objects such as comets, meteors or planets are more mysterious.) Searching out evidence such as an artist’s letters and written recollections, other works created in the same vicinity, and period maps, Olson methodically eliminates locations and dates suggested by previous scholars, in the manner of a sharp district attorney destroying a criminal’s alibi. 

Of Friedrich’s The Evening Star, he knew that past catalogs had guessed the painting was likely created between 1820 and 1835. Some sources suggested the hill was an invention of the artist, who used it to create an idealized view of Dresden. Olson had read virtually every book on Friedrich, and the uncertainties around this painting, he felt sure, would clear up once he and his team gathered the necessary hard facts.

When Pope wrote to me about the Friedrich painting, she explained that besides helping with astronomical research on the date and location of creation, my photos might corroborate a discovery Olson had made during his investigation of J.M.W. Turner’s Moonlight, a Study at Millbank: Small dots in photographs of paintings were routinely assumed to be dust or image defects and promptly “cleaned up” by photographers—but some of them were probably stars or planets. Perhaps a few unretouched cellphone shots, taken as close as I could get to the actual painting, would clear everything up.

---

Pope did not have to ask twice. I knew I had to find that dot.

Kathy and I made our way to the Met on a brilliant Sunday morning. My wife moved slowly through the Friedrich exhibition, looking at many paintings. But I raced across Gallery 199, visually scanning images and zigzagging through room upon room. 

Finally I spotted it. I waited for the couple ahead of me to finish reading the description and studying the work. A relatively small painting, The Evening Star is nearly 18 inches wide and around 13 inches tall—a bit bigger than a laptop screen. I saw the hilltop at sunset, the spires of Dresden and the boy with his arms raised at a sky that was clear behind two bands of gray cloud. And there it was: a minuscule dot of pigment above the clouds. I pulled out my cellphone and shot several image bursts. Then I wound back against the human current.  

“Found it!” I proclaimed in a stage whisper. Taking Kathy by the wrist, I dragged her downstream. When we reached the painting, I tried to show her Venus by holding up my finger such that its shadow touched the spot. She didn’t see it. I moved in more closely—and then she saw it. She brought her finger in closer still, and I photographed its shadow on Venus.

“Please step away from the painting,” ordered a security guard.

I apologized and explained what we were doing. We pointed out Venus to the guard, whose name I learned was Cheryl Calloway. As we stood talking, a couple looking at the painting overheard us.

“I’m a photographer,” said Jeff Potter from Rhode Island. “If I were editing a photo of this painting and saw that dot, I’d think it was dust and take it out.” Apparently that’s what a lot of viewers had done, too: mentally skipped over the dot, simply because it was so small.

---

I sent Pope and Olson my photos. Olson observed that I had used simple filters on my phone to try to make Venus more visible, so he insisted that I resend the raw images only. I did so. He soon emailed back: “Your photo of The Evening Star may be the best that I have seen with respect to color—and it includes the evening star!”  

Based on the time of day and the absence of the sun from The Evening Star, Olson deduced that it depicted a date near the time of what astronomers call the “greatest elongation”—an event that happens up to once or twice in any given year, when Venus appears farthest away from the rising or setting sun in Earth’s sky. Also visible in the work are four towers of Dresden, all heavily damaged in World War II but later restored, which could help tie the date to a specific location. Olson later found eight historical maps of the city, some of which depicted hills, including the one where the figures stand in the painting. In fact, this particular hill had obscured what the maps show was then an unsightly industrial area between the grassy foreground and the distant spires.

From these facts, Olson knew that the view was toward the southwest. Only two greatest elongations could possibly work with the location of Venus in the sky and the painting’s perspective: 1825 and 1833. From related research, Olson also knew that the artist sometimes painted his own family. In another painting, The Stages of Life, dated by most experts to between 1833 and 1835, Friedrich depicted himself and his family, including his son, Gustav Adolf. Olson deduced that the only greatest elongation occurring in a year when Gustav Adolf would’ve been the right age was that of March 1833. Olson found and listed additional details to complete a Friedrich chapter for his latest book. Just before the Met exhibition closed, he and his wife traveled to New York, following Kathy’s and my footsteps to the painting, where Olson, always looking, took additional photos. 

---

Some art historians embrace Olson’s methods and conclusions, while others express mixed reactions. “We are sometimes pretty siloed in our little towers,” admits Paul Hayes Tucker, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “Some art historians look at artworks as if they depict casually selected subjects to be immortalized. But for really great artists, whatever they’re going to paint derives from their individual experiences and their moment in time.” In other words, they are laden with meaning. Tucker points to Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, the painting that gave rise to the term Impressionism, as an example of the value of Olson’s approach. Past books and catalogs had given conflicting dates for which year the work was produced, and had suggested locations ranging from a small boat in the harbor to different spots on land. In 2014, Olson established that Monet was likely painting the scene on two possible dates (either November 13, 1872, or January 25, 1873), and Tucker was impressed by the exacting details the astronomer used to establish where Monet painted it from (the window of his hotel room at the Hôtel de l’Amirauté in Le Havre, France). 

Fun fact: Donald Olson once investigated whether the moon helped sink the Titanic

The moon came extraordinarily close to Earth on January 4, 1912. At 221,442 miles away, it reached its closest approach in more than 1,400 years. A full moon occurred just six minutes from the moment of closest approach. 

• At the time, Earth was also near its closest point to the sun. This rare combination strengthened the tide-generating forces, potentially helping produce unusually high tides.  

• Olson proposed in a 2012 paper that strong tides might’ve helped release stranded icebergs, previously grounded near Newfoundland and Labrador, allowing them to drift into shipping lanes.  

• The timing was suggestive: The Titanic struck an iceberg on April 14, 1912, about three months later. That spring, the number of icebergs crossing south of Newfoundland was nearly two and a half times the average.  

• The moon theory remains unproven. A 2014 study found that the January tidal event was unlikely to be a major cause of the unusually high iceberg numbers—and suggested that atmospheric and glaciological conditions offered alternative explanations. 

Joseph Leo Koerner, an art historian at Harvard University and author of Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, recently read Olson’s account of The Evening Star. “I enjoyed the precision of observations,” he writes in an email. But he adds that Friedrich’s art contains four “related but diverging” time scales: “First, the time of immediate perception recorded in drawings and notebooks, often with the date of the sketch carefully recorded on the sheet.” Then there’s “the time of artistic creation, which happens deliberately away from nature in his famously bare studio, with windows shuttered, closed except for the upper reaches, to let in light but no view. Friedrich imagines this time of artistic creation as parallel to the creative force of nature, of natural processes.” Thirdly, there’s historical time, “visualized in the recurring motifs of ruined temples, cathedrals, monuments and markers.” Finally, there’s “geological time, deep time, as recently discovered by scientists.”

Koerner believes these elements may sometimes complicate Olson’s detective work, since precise astronomical events stand in contrast to the second time scale: “Proof of this tension is that the same moon phase appears in paintings executed many years apart.” Koerner cites Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon, several copies of which the painter made over the course of a decade. Koerner also notes a portrait by Georg Friedrich Kersting that depicts his friend Friedrich in the studio, working on a waterfall, which is “an image of his own creativity happening then and there”—that is, he’s not staring at a waterfall to make his painting. Koerner adds that the final element, deep time, fascinated Friedrich, whose landscapes depict geologic change in arctic ice masses and mountain ranges wrought over thousands or millions of years, with no obviously fixed time. 

Koerner says Olson’s pinpointed times are “interesting for dating, and sometimes compelling,” while insisting that the “temporality of the painting” differs from events in the world, even cosmic ones.

Still, some astronomers have found a sturdy model in Olson’s work. Bradley E. Schaefer, an astronomer and physicist and professor emeritus at Louisiana State University, embraces Olson’s interdisciplinary approach. He has built his own art investigations using similar methods and “the research paths that Olson pioneered so well.” 

As a caver, I have stared in wonder at ancient drawings on cavern walls, trying to imagine their creators. But I have also known the scientific thrill of helping date their work through bits of ash that fell from their torches. Like Pope, I have spent countless hours literally crawling through the deep time hidden in caves, brushing by fossils from Devonian seafloors, easing past stalactites that have dripped for millennia. My hobby encourages interdisciplinary behavior: To some degree, all cavers eventually become amateur geologists, biologists, archaeologists, artists and philosophers. They sometimes get muddy alongside experts who hold degrees in those fields. Even as I raced through the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the same excitement I tend to feel upon finding a virgin cave passage, I had to pause for a moment at another Friedrich painting, Cave in the Harz, depicting an enticing entrance within a sinkhole perhaps altered by glacial till. Nature and the unknown can instill great joy worthy of artistic embrace. But for explorers and scientists, equally great joy can emerge by identifying hard data that illuminates these works anew. The thrill I felt helping Olson, in even a small way, came from his long success in bridging the two. 

You Might Also Like

• October 28, 2026

• October 27, 2026

• October 27, 2026

• October 27, 2026

• October 27, 2026

• More about:
• Art
• Astronomers
• Astronomy
• Astrophysics
• Literature
• Outer Space
• Painters
• Painting