I am writing a spec to build a heliostat to track the sun and bring sunlight into our lab as a spectral and radiometric reference.
If I know our location, say 34 North Latitude and 117 West Longitude, how do I figure the extents of Azimuth and Elevation I need on my tracking telescope to aim at the sun all year round?
Is there a handy-dandy website that I can plug my coordinates into and get the ranges? I know I can go to Weather Underground and get the solar ephemeris for a given day, but what about for the whole year?
If there is such a page, my Google-Fu wasn’t good enough to find it myself.
Thanks for helping… and if you know of someone who would be interested in bidding on building this thingie for us (15 cm aperture with relay optics from a mast-mounted tracking scope to an indoor lab), you can pass their name along as well.
It’s not called “elevation”, it’s called “altitude”. Hence, you are asking about an alt-az (altitude-azimuth) mount. As for altitude, the max will be (90-34) + tilt of axis. If it’s good enough for your purposes, I’d call it’s 23.5. So, the max altitude will be 90-34+23.5. The min angle will be 90-34-23.5
As for azimuth, during the course of the year, the sun’s angle off due a E-W line would be +/- 23.5 degrees. This is the max/min the ecliptic can vary off what I’d call the “zero line” of due E-W.
As an amateur astronomer, azimuth is not thought of too often. RA (right ascension) and Dec (declination) are much more important. But, I hope this helps!
Well, actually it’s more like 34.05 / -177.75… I just truncated the decimals for my example. (Thank goodness for Terraserver… I lost my GPS. Or someone swiped it… haven’t figured out which yet.)
But Mrs Bughunter and I were in Oak Glen on the 9th of October buying buttloads of apples… just a day or two before our son was born.
So, for us folks at about the 34th parallel, we have the altitude spec as -1° to 80°, and the azimuth spec as 55° to 305° (putting a bit of margin on all around).