Qibla direction in Delta

How to face the Qibla in Delta

Stand where you will pray and find north first. Then turn towards north and move a further 16.7° towards east: the result is the bearing of 16.7°. A small error of a few degrees is forgiven by most scholars, but aiming simply at north would leave you about 17° off.

Scholars agree that someone who can see the Kaaba must face it exactly, while someone far away faces its direction (jihat al-Ka‘bah) as precisely as reasonably possible. If a mosque is nearby, its mihrab and prayer lines are the easiest reference, since they were set when the building was laid out. At home, mark the direction once with tape or a small arrow so the whole family prays the same way.

Why a flat map shows a different direction

This is a place where maps mislead badly: a straight line on a flat map from Delta to Mecca points to 102.0° (east), a full 85.2° away from the true Qibla of 16.7° (north). The map line keeps one compass heading and is 2,827 km longer than the great-circle route. Because the Earth is a sphere, the shortest way to Mecca from Delta first heads north, and that is the direction to face.

The angle on this page is the initial bearing of the great circle from 49.0892° N, 123.0532° W to the Kaaba (21.4225° N, 39.8262° E). It is the method used by mosque architects and by every serious Qibla calculator, and it gives one exact answer for each point on Earth.

Distance from Delta to Mecca and Medina

Mecca is 11,993 km from Delta as the crow flies, and Medina, the city of the Prophet ﷺ, is 11,657 km away. A direct flight would take roughly 14 h 37 min, although most pilgrims from Delta connect through Jeddah or Medina airport.

Clocks in Delta run 10 hours behind Mecca all year. Prayer times, however, depend on the sun at your own location, so always use the prayer times of Delta rather than those of Mecca.

Finding the Qibla with the sun in Delta

From Delta the sun never rises high in the Qibla direction of 16.7°, so you cannot simply face the sun. The opposite method works instead, as the right-hand column of the table shows.

On 365 days the sun stands exactly opposite the Qibla: then the shadow of any vertical object, a pole, a door frame or a plumb line, points straight towards Mecca. This is most frequent in January (31 days), for instance on 1 January 2027 at 14:26.

Twice a year the sun passes directly over the Kaaba, on 28 May 2027 and 16 July 2027. Both happen at night in Delta (02:18 and 02:27 local time), so they cannot be used here. Instead, on 13 January 2027 at 14:29 and 28 November 2027 at 14:09 the sun is over the point opposite the Kaaba, and every vertical shadow in Delta points straight to Mecca.

Delta compared with other cities

Compared with Ottawa, 3,539 km away, the Qibla in Delta is turned 40.4° further anticlockwise (16.7° against 57.2°), and Mecca is 1,848 km farther away. The nearest city with its own Qibla page, Surrey (17 km), prays towards 16.9°, a difference of 0.2°.

Across the 46 cities in Canada on this site, the Qibla ranges from 16.5° in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada to 73.4° in St. John's, a spread of 56.9°. That is too large to use one national direction, so each city has its own bearing.

See all cities on the Qibla page for Canada.

Qibla in cities near Delta

• Surrey16.9° · 17 km
• Vancouver16.7° · 18 km
• Coquitlam17.0° · 29 km
• Abbotsford British Columbia17.5° · 58 km
• Victoria, British Columbia, Canada16.5° · 76 km
• Chilliwack17.8° · 81 km