Answered

Chanukah candle lighting times inconsistent

9 years ago • updated 6 years ago • 3

I am trying to get the Chanukah candle lighting times to display correctly on my website (http://maoztzur.info/).

I want to display it based on the user's IP address. I retrieve the user's coordinates via plugging their IP address into the freegeoip API.

I am testing it with location set to Jerusalem by manually plugging in latitude 31.7833 and longitude 35.2167, which is what Google returns for Jerusalem. However for today this returns a time of 5:47pm, whereas https://www.hebcal.com/shabbat/?city=IL-Jerusalem returns a time of 5:25pm.

Any idea as to where this discrepancy comes from?

Thanks

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6 years ago

Hi Michael,

I've only just got back to working on my web app. Thanks for clarifying. When you say "specify Jerusalem" does that include specifying Jerusalem via its geonameid?

So when using geonameids will that automatically deal with the variances in lighting times?

Thanks

9 years ago

Ok thank you. I'll do that for next year.

Answered

9 years ago

We typically light candles 18 minutes before sunset in most of the world, but 40 minutes before sunset in Jerusalem.

When you specify Jerusalem using the typical URL in Hebcal, you get the special 40-minutes-before-sundown feature automatically.

If you are going to specify candle-lighting times with our API by latitude, longitude and time zone and you want to specify 40 minutes before sundown for Jerusalem, be sure to specify b=40 in the URL (overriding the default b=18).

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