The packing of circles on a hemisphere

The problem of the closest packing of N equal nonoverlapping circles on a sphere has been of interest in geometry, chemistry, biology, engineering and optimization. The problem of packing N equal nonoverlapping circles on a hemisphere is a different problem of the same type and is also of interest in various fields such as detecting signals in a multisource neighbourhood and measuring solar radiation. The paper introduces a method for locating N equal nonoverlapping circles on a hemisphere arranged along parallel rings. The method provides information on the elevation and orientation angles of the circles and circle size; and calculates the surface coverage by the circles. The circles may represent the view angles of detectors arranged on a hemisphere. The solution is given for 2-40 detectors.