Emmanuel Leutz was born in Germany but his family moved to the US when he was 9.
Initially settling in Virginia, the family then moved to Philadelphia. Although the wiki bio does not say when they moved there, one can speculate that his father moved shortly thereafter because he did not sympathize with slavery because Emmanuel Leutz was known to have had strong anti-slavery beliefs. If the family had moved North not long after arriving in the US, then Emmanuel could have spent possibly 14 years in the Philadelphia region, only 35 miles from the famous location of Washington's Crossing. Enough time to have actually visited the scene of the crossing and Trenton? Enough time to know what the night sky and its stars looks like in Winter? And sunrises too. Fourteen years time. Might he have a familiarity with the Sun and Moon's rising and setting? Perhaps heard the war stories of a Revolutionary War vet or two?
Who should we trust to tell us if he intended the light source behind the clouds to be the Moon or the Sun? Art historians? Maybe historians who had not lived there? The MSM version of a historian of the 1850s?
Many Wild West dime-novel "historians" existed and wrote fabulous tales of the West never set foot in the locality of their exaggerated tales.
My point? Perhaps an artist may have had to adjust or "take liberty" with the lighting in order to be able to depict the figures in a nighttime scene. This brings me to where "historians" say Leutz took liberties with the scene, saying he depicted a "daytime" crossing with the "sun rising."
I went back and found the location and times of where Sun and Moon would have risen and set. They do not comport with the learned historians' account. They do corroborate where a Moon should have been during a post-7:30pm crossing of the Delaware. The sun would have barely peaked over the horizon at the bearing shown in the picture. The Moon, however, would be 2 to 3 hours in the sky. Remember that Washington sent a dispatch from McConkey's Ferry at 7pm, no doubt leaving soon thereafter- between 7:30 and 8:30pm?
Look at the original painting. Although all we have is a b/w photo of it, it seems much darker. Can anons even make out stars on the flag? And are those stars in the upper right hand sky?