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The initial motivation for the introduction of the polar system was the study of circular and orbital motion. Polar coordinates are most appropriate in any context where the phenomenon being considered is inherently tied to direction and length from a center point in a plane, such as spirals. Planar physical systems with bodies moving around a ...
The universal polar stereographic (UPS) coordinate system is used in conjunction with the universal transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinate system to locate positions on the surface of the Earth. Like the UTM coordinate system, the UPS coordinate system uses a metric-based cartesian grid laid out on a conformally projected surface.
The polar coordinate system is a two-dimensional coordinate system in which each point on a plane is determined by a distance from a reference point and an angle from a reference direction. The reference point (analogous to the origin of a Cartesian system) is called the pole, and the ray from the pole in the reference direction is the polar axis.
Another common coordinate system for the plane is the polar coordinate system. [7] A point is chosen as the pole and a ray from this point is taken as the polar axis. For a given angle θ, there is a single line through the pole whose angle with the polar axis is θ (measured counterclockwise from the axis to the line).
The polar angle is denoted by [,]: it is the angle between the z-axis and the radial vector connecting the origin to the point in question. The azimuthal angle is denoted by φ ∈ [ 0 , 2 π ] {\displaystyle \varphi \in [0,2\pi ]} : it is the angle between the x -axis and the projection of the radial vector onto the xy -plane.
Log-polar coordinates in the plane consist of a pair of real numbers (ρ,θ), where ρ is the logarithm of the distance between a given point and the origin and θ is the angle between a line of reference (the x-axis) and the line through the origin and the point.
Once the radius is fixed, the three coordinates (r, θ, φ), known as a 3-tuple, provide a coordinate system on a sphere, typically called the spherical polar coordinates. The plane passing through the origin and perpendicular to the polar axis (where the polar angle is a right angle ) is called the reference plane (sometimes fundamental plane ).
Conversely, the polar line (or polar) of a point Q in a circle C is the line L such that its closest point P to the center of the circle is the inversion of Q in C. If a point A lies on the polar line q of another point Q, then Q lies on the polar line a of A. More generally, the polars of all the points on the line q must pass through its pole Q.