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update docs
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klausbrunner committed Jun 27, 2015
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Expand Up @@ -54,4 +54,19 @@ Yes. None of the classes hold any mutable shared state. As the calculation is ob

### How do I get the time of sunrise/sunset?

See current snapshot code for a "beta quality" implementation.
The SPA class now includes a method to calculate the times of sunrise, sun transit, and sunset in one fell swoop:

```java
GregorianCalendar[] res = SPA.calculateSunriseTransitSet(time, 70.978056, 25.974722, 68);
```

Note that the times of sunrise and sunset may be NULL if the sun never sets or rises during the specified day (i.e. polar days and nights).

### What's with this "delta T" thing?

See [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ΔT) for an explanation. For many simple applications, this value could be negligible as it's just about a minute as of this writing. However, if you're looking for maximum accuracy, you should either use a current observed value (published e.g. by the US Naval Observatory) or at least a solid estimate.

The DeltaT class provides an estimator based on polynomials fitting a number of observed (or extrapolated) historical values, published by [Espenak and Meeus](http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEcat5/deltatpoly.html). Here's a plot of its output compared with some published ΔT data:

![deltat](resources/deltat.png)

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