“Reason behind pre-sunset Maghrib call to prayer and method for accurate timing explained in Al-Musnad”

Al-Marsad Newspaper: Abdullah Al-Misnad, a researcher in weather and climate, revealed the reason for the Maghrib call to prayer, even though the sun has not set in some cities and regions.

The reason for the call to prayer before sunset

Al-Misnad indicated, through his official account on the “Twitter” website, that applications and calendars deliberately calculate prayer times and sunrise for a city or governorate by adopting the astronomical location factor (geographical coordinates), and this is no problem, but many of them do not take the factor of height above sea level for the target location. An influencing factor in the times of sunset and sunrise, and this makes the program calculate the times of sunrise and sunset (maghrib time) on the grounds that the height of the target location is zero.

Al-Musnad explained that if the target city’s height is above sea level otherwise, the result of the calendar will show the sunrise time later than the reality, and the sunset time earlier, which will make the muezzin call to Morocco minutes before the time, the length of which varies according to the city’s height above sea level.

Al-Misnad called on the drafters of the calendars to take the factor of height above sea level into account so that the results would be in conformity with the geographical reality, and a discharge of responsibility and completion of the task.

way to check

And Al-Misnad continued, “In order to be assured that the sunset time is correct in your location, compare the time of sunset in your application or calendar with the results of the prayer times program, which depends in calculating the factor of height above sea level.”

Al-Misnad hoped that the programmers of prayer times applications on mobile phones would take the factor of height above sea level into account, and that the application would read the altitude automatically via the GPS mechanism, and then it would calculate the sunrise and sunset times accurately.