Sky and Telescope - August 2015 - 34

Telltale Sun & Shadow

Astor Roof Sign: 5:51 p.m.
The breakthrough came when we looked at vintage photographs of the Hotel Astor with its elegant roof garden.
The hotel had a sign in the shape of an inverted "L"
projecting a little above roof level, advertising the Astor
Roof. Blueprints preserved at Columbia University show
that the vertical arm of the sign was 40 feet high, its
horizontal top was 18 feet wide, and the top edge stood
150 feet above street level.
Measurements on old photographs and maps established that the top of the sign and the top of the shadow
on the Loew's Building had a horizontal separation of 134
feet and a diﬀerence of 56 feet in height above street level.
A line from the shadow on the 8th-ﬂoor windows of the
Loew's Building to the Astor Roof sign would point to the
upper limb of the Sun being at azimuth 270°° (exactly due
west) and at an altitude of +22.7°. As seen from the Loew's
Building 8th ﬂoor, the solar disk was disappearing behind
the Astor Roof sign at 5:51 p.m. Eastern War Time.
Because the Sun's disk has a ﬁnite size, with a diameter of 31.6′ on August 14th, the 18-foot-wide top of the
sign would project an umbral shadow about 16 feet wide
at the distance of the Loew's Building, also in good agreement with the shadow in Eisenstaedt's photographs.
Our topographical analysis ruled out every other tall
structure in or near Times Square. Only the Astor Roof
sign could cast the photographed shadow, and it did so at
exactly 5:51 p.m.
We then checked our mathematical results by
building a scale model of the buildings, including the
L-shaped sign. A large, ﬂat mirror allowed us to project
the Sun's rays onto the model from any desired altitude and azimuth. The location, size, and shape of the
shadow on our model Loew's Building exactly matches
the shadow in Eisenstaedt's Kiss photographs.

Conﬁrmation: Pennsylvania Railroad
Victor Jorgensen took his Kiss photograph at the same
time as Eisenstaedt's second of four frames. Two days
34

August 2015 sky & telescope

later, Jorgensen's wife wrote a letter describing how on
VJ Day they had traveled up to Manhattan on a train
departing Washington, D.C., at 11:00 a.m. Railroad
timetables show this train arriving at New York's Penn
Station at exactly 3:00 p.m. Allowing some time for
checking into a hotel, where Jorgensen dropped oﬀ
some photographic gear, and then proceeding to Times
Square, Jorgensen cannot have reached Times Square
until at least 3:30 p.m. and perhaps even after 4:00 p.m.
Thus Jorgensen's train trip provides additional evidence to rule out the proposed 2 p.m. time for the Kiss
photographs, but it's consistent with our calculated time
of 5:51 p.m.

Conﬁrmation: "Peace At Last"
Two more Eisenstaedt VJ Day photographs, known as
Peace at Last, show a couple looking up at the Times
electric news sign. In the background, the shadow of the
Times Building falls onto the last word in a sign reading "PUBLIC TELEPHONE CENTER for the ARMED
FORCES." Vintage photographs and maps show that this

ALFRED EISENSTAEDT / LIFE (© TIME INC.)

Now we needed to identify the building casting the
shadow. We ﬁrst considered the Hotel Astor, across the
street to the west. The shadow on the Loew's Building
has a ﬂat top only about 16 feet wide, so our thought was
to search old photographs and blueprints to ﬁnd a ﬂattopped water tower on the Astor roof. This theory immediately foundered because we learned that the summit
of the Astor Hotel held no standard water tanks at all!
Instead, the top was known as the Astor Roof Garden, an
elegant site for music, dining, and dancing.
But we were able to rule out other buildings one by
one: the Paramount Building, the Hotel Lincoln on 8th
Avenue, the Times Building. A Schlitz Beer sign on the
roof of the Bond Clothes building was too short to cast a
shadow of the length in the Kiss photographs. Nothing ﬁt.

ON THE SAME ROLL This Eisenstaedt VJ Day photograph,
known as Peace at Last, shows a couple looking up at the moving electric news scroll on the Times Building. In the background, the shadow of the Times Building on the façade of the
Public Telephone Center for the Armed Forces (the shadow's
edge crosses the R in "Forces") allows us to determine that
this image was captured near 5 p.m. Eisenstaedt's roll of Kodak
Plus-X ﬁlm includes Peace at Last, then a dozen other scenes,
and then the famous Kiss series.

Sky and Telescope - August 2015

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