Sky & Telescope - January 2020 - 27

A LL PHOTOS COURTESY OF CREIG H TON UNIV ERSIT Y

n December 9, 1910, attorney John Yeisner's client
was on track to be convicted for attempted murder.
Every piece of evidence seemed stacked against him.
One can imagine the confusion in the Nebraska courthouse
when Yeisner called his star defense witness to the stand. The
53-year-old man wasn't a doctor, an investigator, or a character witness for the accused.
He was an astronomer, clad in the formal garb of a Jesuit
priest.
In a remarkable meeting of photography, cutting-edge
science, and organized crime, Father William Rigge used
astronomy to demolish the prosecution's case. With careful analysis of a shadow in a photograph, he dismantled the
timeline presented by the police, invalidated the testimony of
the prosecution's key witnesses, and put an innocent man on
the path to freedom.
It was a stroke of luck that Rigge ended up in Nebraska at
all. He had distinguished himself at Georgetown University's
observatory in Washington, DC, and seemed poised to lead
in the ﬁeld of astronomy. But severe eyestrain prevented him
from continuing his research, so the Jesuits reassigned him
from the newly built 12-inch refracting telescope at Georgetown to ﬂedgling Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.
Rigge's vision may have been impaired, but his spirit
remained undimmed. He threw himself into enhancing and
running Creighton Observatory and became a central member of the Omaha community, as well as an evangelist of
astronomy and modern science. His outreach efforts included
a widely publicized construction of a Foucault pendulum in
an abandoned smokestack on Creighton's campus, organizing a faculty expedition to Georgia to witness the famed total
solar eclipse of 1900, and hosting regular public viewing
sessions through Creighton's 5-inch refracting telescope. He
also published widely on topics designed to engage broader
audiences, from perpetual calendars to upcoming eclipses
and transits, as well as reviews of the newest developments in
the ﬁeld of astronomy.
A 1904 article Rigge published in Scientiﬁc American may
stand out as his work of greatest consequence. While contemplating a photo of his observatory taken some years earlier,
Rigge mused that pronounced shadows cast onto the front
of the structure could offer the means to reconstruct when
it was taken. Rigge worked through the riddle, calculated the
precise moment the photograph was snapped, and went on
to conﬁrm his hypothesis by watching the expected tableau
of shadows realign on the façade of the observatory when his
projected date and time rolled around again in 1904.
The key to Rigge's method is that the daily course of the
Sun from east to west and its north-south variation through
the seasons yield only a pair of dates and a single time to
which any given solar position can ever correlate, as shown
on page 28. Rigge's breakthrough was realizing that pronounced shadows in a photograph can offer the means to
reverse-engineer the Sun's position in the sky - and by extension, the exact date and time of the photograph's capture.

The key to RigƐe's method is that the daily
course of the Sun from east to west and its
north-south variation through the seasons
yield only a pair of dates and a single time
to which any given solar position can ever
correlate.
The public was fascinated by this revelation. Somewhere in
the buzz of local media and the public lectures surrounding
Rigge's newest work, his pioneering method lodged itself in
the mind of an up-and-coming attorney named John Yeisner.
And six years later, when a tough case looked to be at the
brink of losing an innocent man his freedom, Rigge's methodological innovation would save the day.
The case began on May 22, 1910, when the police found
and defused a suitcase bomb on the porch of Omaha's reigning political boss and racketeer. The police quickly ﬁngered
Yeisner's client, a mortal enemy of the politico, as their prime
suspect. As the investigation grew, the prosecution found
their ace in the hole: a pair of eyewitnesses. Two teenage girls
claimed that they had seen the accused carrying a suitcase
matching the bomb's description as they were on their way
home after church that day. They could not see his face but
recognized him by his clothes and distinctive limp.
Yeisner suspected that the supposed victim had planted
the bomb on his own porch and then hired a look-alike to
walk the streets with a dummy suitcase to make the suspect
look guilty. But as the trial date approached, all looked lost -
that is, until December 2nd, a week before open court, when
Yeisner uncovered what would become the key piece of exculpatory evidence. He discovered that the teenage witnesses
had been photographed after church on the day of the crime.
The Sun had projected
a prominent shadow
across the church
façade. The attorney had
an inkling: Could this
be the key to exonerating his client? He set out
to ﬁnd the astronomer
who would help him
ﬁnd out.
Rigge leapt at the
opportunity, excited by
the prospect of bringing his method to bear
u William Rigge had a
keen mind, a dry wit, and
a passion for mathematical
precision.
sk yandtelescope.com * JANUARY 2 02 0

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Sky & Telescope - January 2020

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