Erik, I agree that Ramadan is defined by the crescent of the new moon, but depending on the branch of Islam in some cases they are happy to use the predicted values, but in others it has to be observed, which can cause a difference due to either simple differences in observations or things like cloud cover. My work in this area was in software for prayer times, where this difference is taken into account - I don't know if time zones in countries are happy to use the predictions, or whether some of them use the observations. Tim Smartcom Software Ltd Portsmouth Technopole Kingston Crescent Portsmouth PO2 8FA United Kingdom www.smartcomsoftware.com Smartcom Software is a limited company registered in England and Wales, registered number 05641521. -----Original Message----- From: tz-bounces@iana.org [mailto:tz-bounces@iana.org] On Behalf Of Erik Homoet Sent: 04 March 2013 08:53 To: Paul Eggert Cc: Sascha von Gualtieri; tz@iana.org Subject: Re: [tz] Timezones Morocco 2013 incorrect Hi Paul, Law by the government is the for the long term, not having DST during Ramadan: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2698707/en http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/morocco-dst-2012.html http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/time-zone/africa/morocco/time-morocco/ http://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/ An official link for the announcement for this year I cannot find on official local websites but on all timezone and worldtime websites and airlines booking engines are using it. Ramadan is defined by cresent of new moon. The dates for the coming years can be found on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramadan_%28calendar_month%29 Best regards, Erik On 02/03/13 03:20, "Paul Eggert" <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
On 02/28/13 02:46, Erik Homoet wrote:
Morocco is also on Wintertime during the month of Ramadan.
Thank you for the heads-up. Can you please point us at a local, reliable source for this news? Presumably timeanddate.com got it from somewhere. An English-language source would be preferred, but Arabic is OK.
The Wikipedia article "Daylight saving time in Morocco" <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_Morocco> says "starting in 2012, clocks shall be advanced 60 minutes at 02:00 on the last Sunday of April of each year, and return to UTC at 03:00 on the last Sunday of September of the same year, with the exception of the holy month of Ramadan, during which DST will not be observed." But the sources it cites don't actually seem to say this.
Which raises the question: how is Ramadan determined in Morocco? Is it a government decree long in advance, or is it decided based on visual sightings of the crescent moon? If the latter, it's going to be hard for us to predict the daylight-saving transitions.
Erik Homoet Business Consultant quintessence consulting AMS mobile: +31 614534022 email: ehomoet@quintessence.net skype: erik_qc_ams