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The solid angle of a sphere measured from any point in its interior is 4 π sr. The solid angle subtended at the center of a cube by one of its faces is one-sixth of that, or 2 π /3 sr. The solid angle subtended at the corner of a cube (an octant) or spanned by a spherical octant is π /2 sr, one-eight of the solid angle of a sphere. [1]
The solid angle subtended is the same as that of a cone with the same projected area. A solid angle of one steradian subtends a cone aperture of approximately 1.144 radians or 65.54 degrees. In the SI, solid angle is considered to be a dimensionless quantity, the ratio of the area projected onto a surrounding sphere and the square of the sphere ...
The solid angle, Ω, at the vertex of a Platonic solid is given in terms of the dihedral angle by Ω = q θ − ( q − 2 ) π . {\displaystyle \Omega =q\theta -(q-2)\pi .\,} This follows from the spherical excess formula for a spherical polygon and the fact that the vertex figure of the polyhedron { p , q } is a regular q -gon.
The user may choose to replace the inclination angle by its complement, the elevation angle (or altitude angle), measured upward between the reference plane and the radial line—i.e., from the reference plane upward (towards to the positive z-axis) to the radial line. The depression angle is the negative of the elevation angle.
The angle between two planes (such as two adjacent faces of a polyhedron) is called a dihedral angle. [18] It may be defined as the acute angle between two lines normal to the planes. The angle between a plane and an intersecting straight line is complementary to the angle between the intersecting line and the normal to the plane.
In spherical coordinates, every point in space is represented by its distance ρ from the origin, the angle θ its projection on the xy-plane makes with respect to the horizontal axis, and the angle φ that it makes with respect to the z-axis. The names of the angles are often reversed in physics. [16]
The trend is the compass direction of the line, and the plunge is the downward angle it makes with a horizontal plane. [15] For a plane, the two angles are called its strike (angle) and its dip (angle). A strike line is the intersection of a horizontal plane with the observed planar feature (and therefore a horizontal line), and the strike ...
Because of the symmetry of cubic crystals, it is possible to change the place and sign of the integers and have equivalent directions and planes: Coordinates in angle brackets such as 100 denote a family of directions that are equivalent due to symmetry operations, such as [100], [010], [001] or the negative of any of those directions.