Prayer Times Modeling with GIS: A Case Study for Iran and Its Surrounding

Abstract

Traditionally, the time of Prayer was being announced through mosques. Nowadays, there's a special time in cities of Muslim countries, known as prayer times table. Mean while villages lack such division or table, they use the Prayer times of nearby cities. In non-muslim countries, such tables just belong to big cities and other areas have difficulties to find (precise) prayer times. Quantitative computation of Prayer times is dependent on geographical coordinate of that place and space/time position of Sun. Residential areas were determined as polygon and each of them are located in a specific geographical coordinate. It's not possible to use the Prayer time of one point for another point far from that. In this research, the area was divided into pixels of 1000*1000 m and Prayer time was calculated with astronomical relations. The accuracy of this study had been compared to those were presented by calendar center of geophysics institute (University of Tehran) and had perfect accuracy. Prayer time was calculated for each pixel of the studying area by GIS. Results of this research showed the necessity of GIS in determining Prayer times and led to more accuracy of calculations.