Empirical Earth · Flight & Navigation

The Sun’s Angle Matches the Globe — and You Can Compute It

The claim

“The Sun is too high in the sky for a globe — sun-angle tests exceed the 45° limit, so Earth is flat.”

What is measured

The Sun’s height at any place and moment is set by your latitude, the Sun’s declination that day, and the hour angle. You can compute it to a fraction of a degree, and it matches what you measure. The high summer Sun confirms the globe. The “45° limit” is a number no almanac, navigator, or solar engineer uses.

What would show this is wrong

a measured Sun elevation that disagreed with the latitude–declination–hour-angle formula anywhere on Earth. Centuries of navigation and every solar-energy installation depend on it agreeing, and it does.

Sources

  1. Compute it yourself. NOAA’s Solar Position Calculator returns the Sun’s elevation and azimuth for any latitude, longitude, date and time. NOAA ESRL/GML link
  2. The solar-elevation formula. NOAA: the Sun’s zenith/elevation from latitude, declination and hour angle — cos(zenith) = sin(lat)sin(dec) + cos(lat)cos(dec)cos(ha). NOAA (solar equations) link
The full entry, with the working →

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