Re: ITL status

[Thamer Mahmoud <thamer at newkuwait dot org>]

abdulhaq writes:
 > this is a message for Thamer really...
 > 
 > I want to release a new version of kprayertime, on account of various 
 > usability improvements. However, I'd also like to include ITL when it has 
 > stabilised. Is there any estimate of when that would be?
 > 

All major changes that were planned for the ITL 0.6 release have
already landed on CVS. The only thing left is a small update to add
"Location.pressure" and "Location.temperature". This "final" update
will happen in the next two days Inshallah. I'm done coding this but
I still havn't done any testing with the new code. 

Nadim, is the plan to move (ipraytime, ical, idate) to their own
folder and make process still on? If you want to do this, now is a
good time ;-). If you don't, just give your thoughts/suggestion on how
to proceed with this and I'll do it later (after updating libprayer).


 > Also, I asked the developer of libnova if it used VSOP87 for the 
 > sunrise/sunset calculations and he said that it did. He also felt that due 
 > to atmospheric refraction the times would only be accurate to about 20 
 > seconds or so.
 > 
 > wassalaam
 > abdulhaq


If your intention is to test against libnova or other astronomy
software, I'd suggest you use what's currently on CVS rather than
waiting for the next update. The next update will introduce a couple
of Earth specific changes that might not be available (or activated by
default) in most of these astronomy tools. Also remember to disable
atmospheric refraction by setting the atmospheric pressure value to
zero (until we add support for this in the ITL's libprayer).
				   
As for my own "extensive but not exhaustive" testing, so far so good
:-). Tests were performed against NASA's ephemeris generator [1] and
we're getting the same exact hours and minutes (with similar setup
and with proper rounding changes to ITL). I will be doing some more
tests just to be sure that all settings of the ephemeris generator
are being setup correctly and optimized for accuracy as much as
possible.

For testing the seconds value, I compared results with the "Sky Map
Pro" results posted on this article [2] and a few other tools, which I
don't have links to at the moment. Anyways, the difference never
exceeded a plus or minus 1 second for sunrise and sunset.

[1] http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/eph
[2] http://www.xylem.f2s.com/kepler/moonrise.html 


Salaam,

Thamer Mahmoud