Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. None of my attempts yielded anything approximating the declension of my wall. Not being that fluent in trig, I got myself tangled up with conversions between azimuth and elevation in degrees as given by the Diallists Companion and the radian format as required by Excel's trig functions. It made sense to convert Azimuth and Altitude from degrees to radians, but I didn't know what to do with the ArcTan of the ratio of two numbers obtained from the framing square. I assume it is necessary to convert the result of the formula from radians to degrees using DEGREES().
I was also unsure of the meaning of "declension" in the context of the numbers I was getting. My reading of Waugh's definition would give a number between 0 and +/- 90 degrees with respect to a cardinal compas point. So my southeast facing deck would be contained by two walls, one declining about -45 degrees and the other about 45 degrees.
I was happy to see that Bill had posted a spreadsheet, but was disappointed that MS Works does not seem to be compatible with MS Excel, which does not recognize a .wks extension. Would it be possible to get the spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel format?
At 02:45 PM 10/6/2002 -0400, you wrote:
I have put the corrected method for finding wall declination on my website (the handout from the NASS conference had significant errors). Go to www.precisionsundials.com/software.htm and download "Wall Declination.doc". It is an MSWord Document. You can also download an MSWorks spreadsheet to assist the calculations called WallDec.wks. I hope this time I've got all the bugs out. Bill G. -
-
