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Thread: How do I calculate sunrise/sunset times for non-Earth planets?

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  1. #11

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    So after thinking that it was wrong, I went through everything a couple more times. Turns out what I did incorrectly was checking my answer on the Navy site I posted earlier. I forgot to enter time zone when picking a location. Once I did that, the times I got for sunrise and sunset using the equations I posted were within 5 minutes of the correct times!

    It's not done yet though. To get from hour angle (the last value I solved for in my previous post) to the times, I used the equations on the Sunrise Equation Wikipedia page, which involve the Julian date. Obviously, another planet would not use Julian date. What matters is the time elapsed since epoch though, so it should be a simple matter of defining my own epochs, using an equivalent of the Julian date. This would make use of the custom planet's day length, so all of parameters involving time will need to take that into account. This means using ratios to change the length of my second and the value of my gravitational constant.

    Now, if only I could code...
    Last edited by snoopy; 07-19-2012 at 03:47 PM.

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