THE EFFECT OF EPHEMERIS DATA RETRIVAL BASED ON TIME ZONES ON THE CALCULATION OF THE BEGINNING OF PRAYER TIMES

Abstract

Five-time praying is valid if someone do the action when it has entered its time. The determination of prayer times need data from Ephemeris which is based on the sun’s motion. Here, the calculation needs sun’s declination and equation of time. Then how if someone do an error in taking Ephemeris data to calculate the time prayer. Should it affect the result. This research also examines how was the effect of prayer time using the taqribi sun’s motion in old books or kitab falak kuno. This article is library research using qualitative data presentation method. This research departs from the question that whether the difference in time zones will essentially affect the results of the calculation of the beginning of prayer time. The focus of this research is implied in whole globe of Earth by choosing four loci from China. This is due to the large area of China but using one type of time zone. From the calculation, the result is the ephemeris data retrieval errors in this calculation do not have a significant impact. There are three reasons why it is not that significant. First, when the Ephemeris data is calculated with trigonometric variables, it will produce smaller data than before. Second, Muslim only need the hour and minute not until the second. Third, there is an addition time to prayer times called ihtiyat or prudence.