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A diagram illustrating great-circle distance (drawn in red) between two points on a sphere, P and Q. Two antipodal points, u and v are also shown. The great-circle distance, orthodromic distance, or spherical distance is the distance between two points on a sphere, measured along the great-circle arc between them. This arc is the shortest path ...
Great-circle navigation or orthodromic navigation (related to orthodromic course; from Ancient Greek ορθός (orthós) 'right angle' and δρόμος (drómos) 'path') is the practice of navigating a vessel (a ship or aircraft) along a great circle. Such routes yield the shortest distance between two points on the globe. [1]
The haversine formula determines the great-circle distance between two points on a sphere given their longitudes and latitudes.Important in navigation, it is a special case of a more general formula in spherical trigonometry, the law of haversines, that relates the sides and angles of spherical triangles.
Spherical trigonometry is the branch of spherical geometry that deals with the metrical relationships between the sides and angles of spherical triangles, traditionally expressed using trigonometric functions. On the sphere, geodesics are great circles. Spherical trigonometry is of great importance for calculations in astronomy, geodesy, and ...
The disk bounded by a great circle is called a great disk: it is the intersection of a ball and a plane passing through its center. In higher dimensions, the great circles on the n-sphere are the intersection of the n-sphere with 2-planes that pass through the origin in the Euclidean space R n + 1. Half of a great circle may be called a great ...
In spherical geometry, the basic concepts are point and great circle. However, two great circles on a plane intersect in two antipodal points, unlike coplanar lines in Elliptic geometry. In the extrinsic 3-dimensional picture, a great circle is the intersection of the sphere with any plane through the center.
An area formula for spherical triangles analogous to the formula for planar triangles. Given a fixed base , an arc of a great circle on a sphere, and two apex points and on the same side of great circle , Lexell's theorem holds that the surface area of the spherical triangle is equal to that of if and only if lies on the small-circle arc , where and are the points antipodal to and , respectively.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to trigonometry: Trigonometry – branch of mathematics that studies the relationships between the sides and the angles in triangles. Trigonometry defines the trigonometric functions, which describe those relationships and have applicability to cyclical phenomena, such as waves.