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Clock issues with an Alecto WS-5000

Posted: Wed 12 Feb 2014 7:30 pm
by patrickduis
Hi, I'm busy with my weather station for my backyard observatory http://sterrenwachtmyrtha.waarnemen.com/index.htm. A
After playing around with it for a few weeks I noticed a few strange things (note that I'm sitting in time zone GMT+1)

- The WS-5000 has a built-in DCF-77 clock. That reads only the correct time when I set the time offset setting in the EasyWeatherPlus 1.0 software from Alecto to 0 (which is strange, because I'm in time zone GMT+1.....
- When I set this time offset to 1, then the clock on the display of my weather statoins reads 1 hour too eary, so this time is just automatically added to the measured time from the DCF-77 clock: that means I should set this offset setting to 0.

Since I'm an amateur astronomer I'm very interested in the rising/setting time of the moon and sun. For some kind of reason these times (which are calculated by Cumulus, as far as I know) are always 1 hour too high, both for the Sun/moon rise and setting times.......

I use on the server that runs Cumulus 1.9.4 WinXP SP3 with correct time zone adjustment (GMT+1) and automatic daylight saving changes.
In cumulus I set the latitude correctly to my location 51.38.39 North and the longitude also correctly, which is 5.13.41E...

Can you experienced guys shine a light on this problem? Thanks!

Re: Clock issues with an Alecto WS-5000

Posted: Wed 12 Feb 2014 8:08 pm
by steve
patrickduis wrote:For some kind of reason these times (which are calculated by Cumulus, as far as I know) are always 1 hour too high, both for the Sun/moon rise and setting times.......I use on the server that runs Cumulus 1.9.4 WinXP SP3 with correct time zone adjustment (GMT+1) and automatic daylight saving changes.
In cumulus I set the latitude correctly to my location 51.38.39 North and the longitude also correctly, which is 5.13.41E...
On your web site, the sunrise and sunset times that Cumulus has calculated are 07:59 and 17:48.

I believe you are not far from Eindhoven? This web page gives the sunrise and sunset times for there as 07:58 and 17:48 - http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/a ... tml?n=1300

The moon times are also within a couple of minutes.

Re: Clock issues with an Alecto WS-5000

Posted: Wed 12 Feb 2014 8:24 pm
by patrickduis
Thanks for checking. I was a bit confused because the website of a fellow astronomer had a mistake in it that sent me off the right track....