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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Determination of the GHA of Aries
From: David Fleming
Date: 2020 Sep 10, 11:14 -0700
From: David Fleming
Date: 2020 Sep 10, 11:14 -0700
Brian,
I suggest you are over thinking the problem. For solar collection you do not care about GHA Aries. GHA Aries is in the Nautical Almanac only(?) to access fixed elements on the Celestial Sphere, ie stars.
In a solar collector, you are not likely to track the sun. The mechanism is too expensive and even if you did you would use feedback not precomputed positions.
A fixed array would be optimized based on the a few data points throughout the year. Sun Dec at the extremes and you Latitude should suffice.
Cheers,
DaveF