Sunalign

The SunAlign program is a program that calculates the sun's position in the sky anywhere on the planet at any time, and aligns a heliostat accordingly. The first version of the program was written in basic by David Williams in the eighties. In 2008 William K. Stewart ported the program to Perl and in 2009 Marius Gundersen ported it to C and made an online javascript test tool

SunAlign Qbasic version

SunAlign generic basic version

How to run a Qbasic program on Vista

How to run a Qbasic program on Linux


SunAlign explained by David Williams

The Latitude and Longitude of the Sun by David Williams

ETIMSDEC.BAS Equation of TIMe and Solar DEClination

Sundial.bas Program for constructing sundials

SunAlign Perl version

SunAlign C version

TIP: Have google earth installed and running while testing these programs. These program takes latitude and longitude as input. If you don't happen to know the coordinates of the place for which you want to run a calculation by heart, it is a good idea having google earth running at the same time. For finding the correct timezone The world clock is a good web site.


Please also see the following forum thread, started by David Willams

strange experience with a heliostat

External links

Article on heliostats on appropedia.org
Wikipedia article on heliostats
Sun Align JavaScript: Test your sun align program against this simple tool.
Compiled version of the sundial program with printer support for windows

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