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

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 are determined as polygon and each of them are located in a specific geographical coordinate. Therefore it’s not possible to use the Prayer time of one point for another point far from that. In this research, the area is divided into pixels of 1000*1000 m and Prayer time is calculated with astronomical relations. The accuracy of this study has been compared to those were presented by Calendar Center of Geophysics Institute (University of Tehran) and have had perfect accuracy. Prayer time is calculated for each pixel of the studying area by GIS. Further analysis on results of this research obviously showed the necessity of GIS in determining Prayer times and led to more accuracy of calculations