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.

Creating a Geographical Information Systems-based Spatial Profile for Exploring Health Services Supply and Demand

“…For example, GIS plays a key and important role in preparing Prayer time map (Aghighi et al, 2008) and it is used for simulation planning for sustainable use of land resources (Yacouba et al, 2009) and for analyzing the concept of spatialfunction in courtyard house layout and its influence to the cultural and social activities (Mustafa and Hassan, 2010). In addition, Liaghat and Balasundram (2010) indicated that Precision Agriculture (PA) can now based on innovative systems approach and these new systems approach depends on a combination of fundamental technologies such as Geographic Information System (GIS), Global Positioning System (GPS), computer modeling, ground based/airborne/satellite remote sensing, variable rate technology and advanced information processing for timely in-season and between season crop management.…”