sun_position.m

Posted by Robert Bemis, July 16, 2010

6 views (last 30 days) | 0 Likes | 8 comments

Note

The file submission referenced in this post is no longer available on File Exchange.

Bob's pick this week is sun_position.m by Vincent Roy.

Here at MathWorks headquarters in Natick, MA we are entering the dog days of Summer. Like many others to help stay cool during the day I minimize unwanted solar heating through windows with shades and blinds. Of course that conserves energy which also saves money!

From a technical aspect you can calculate the position of the Sun. Given a place and time sun_position does the math for you. For example, where is my Noon Sun today?

here.longitude = -71.34993; %deg
here.latitude  =  42.30013; %deg
here.altitude  =  55;       %m
noonToday = datenum('2010-07-16 12:00');
sun_position(noonToday,here)

ans = 
     zenith: 63.368
    azimuth: 84.585

Wikepedia helped get my head around what zenith and azimuth mean.

Thanks to Vincent for making that so easy for me to use. His submission also has a lot of good feedback from others. I appreciate submissions like this where people collaboratively make good work even better as the "updates" section makes clear. Keep up the great work, everyone!

Do you use solar calculations? Tell us about it here.

Published with MATLAB® 7.10