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A straight line drawn on a gnomonic chart is a portion of a great circle. When this is transferred to a Mercator chart , it becomes a curve. The positions are transferred at a convenient interval of longitude and this track is plotted on the Mercator chart for navigation.
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 ...
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 ...
If "line" is taken to mean great circle, spherical geometry only obeys two of Euclid's five postulates: the second postulate ("to produce [extend] a finite straight line continuously in a straight line") and the fourth postulate ("that all right angles are equal to one another"). However, it violates the other three.
The most familiar examples are the straight lines in Euclidean geometry. On a sphere, the images of geodesics are the great circles. The shortest path from point A to point B on a sphere is given by the shorter arc of the great circle passing through A and B. If A and B are antipodal points, then there are infinitely many shortest paths between ...
On a north–south passage the rhumb line course coincides with a great circle, as it does on an east–west passage along the equator. On a Mercator projection map, any rhumb line is a straight line; a rhumb line can be drawn on such a map between any two points on Earth without going off the edge of the map. But theoretically a loxodrome can ...
Under gnomonic projection every great circle on the sphere is projected to a straight line in the plane (a great circle is a geodesic on the sphere, the shortest path between any two points, analogous to a straight line on the plane). [1] More generally, a gnomonic projection can be taken of any n-dimensional hypersphere onto a hyperplane.
A straight line on the Mercator map at angle α to the meridians is a rhumb line. When α = π / 2 or 3 π / 2 the rhumb corresponds to one of the parallels; only one, the equator, is a great circle. When α = 0 or π it corresponds to a meridian great circle (if