I don't know if it was based on fact, but the night sky was certainly remarkable, especially the night she sank. e.g.
When the Titanic stopped her engines survivor Helen Candee went out on deck and gazed at the stars above with Mr. Woolner.
Helen Candee
"It was a marvelous sight all emphasized by a more than twilight and a Heaven full of such stars as only an Arctic cold can produce. They actually lighted the atmosphere. The sea with its glassy surface threw back star by star the dazzling array, and made of the universe a complete unity without the break of a sky-line. It was like the inside of an entire globe. We both gasped at such beauty and for a moment forgot the menace still unexplained but deeply real, wildly impressive......Woolner and I fell under the spell of the marvelous stars. But the dominant note was a deep and solemn sense of peril. It pressed on the soul. It made our puny actions seem unworthy. Something so big hung over us that it dominated all else......Talking was a little assurance of the normal. So I chatted about the stars, foolishly. 'If you will pick for me three of four of the brightest,' I said, 'I will put them in my hair.' Woolner's response was only a sort of grunt, by which I knew I had offended his taste."
Survivor Lawrence Beesley also described the brilliance of the stars above.
"The night was one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. The sky without a single cloud to mar the perfect brilliance of the stars, clustered so thickly together that in places there seemed almost more dazzling points of light set in the black sky than background of sky itself; and each star seemed, in the keen atmosphere, free from any haze, to have increased its brilliance tenfold and to twinkle and glitter with a staccato flash that made the sky seem nothing but a setting made for them in which to display their wonder. They seemed so near, and their light so much more intense than ever before, that fancy suggested they saw this beautiful ship in dire distress below and all their energies had awakened to flash messages across the black dome of the sky to each other; telling and warning of the calamity happening in the world beneath."
"The stars seemed really to be alive and to talk. The complete absence of haze produced a phenomenon I had never seen before: where the sky met the sea the line was as clear and definite as the edge of a knife, so that the water and the air never merged gradually into each other and blended to a softened rounded horizon, but each element was so exclusively separate that where a star came low down in the sky near the clear-cut edge of the waterline, it still lost none of its brilliance. As the earth revolved and the water edge came up and covered partially the star, as it were, it simply cut the star in two, the upper half continuing to sparkle as long as it was not entirely hidden, and throwing a long beam of light along the sea to us."
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