Van Gogh painted The Starry Night in June 1889, from his room in the Saint Paul asylum at Saint Remy, in the south of France. He had committed himself in May, after the breakdown that cost him his ear, and the painting starts from what he saw at the barred window just before sunrise.
A few days earlier he had written to his brother Theo that he saw the countryside from that window "a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big." The canvas is that dawn.
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The dawn is the part he saw. The town is the part he made up.
The village under the hills, with its church spire beside the dark cypress, could not be seen from Van Gogh's window. The Museum of Modern Art says it was based on other views. He painted a dawn he had watched, then built a town around it that he had not. Little in the picture is a plain copy.
To me, that is the real answer to the question. He did not copy the window. He built a picture around one star.
What You'll Discover
Which light is not a star.
What the window never showed him.
Why the night was painted by day.
What he wrote about it afterward.
How it reached New York.