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The rotational axis of Earth, for example, is the imaginary line that passes through both the North Pole and South Pole, whereas the Earth's orbital axis is the line perpendicular to the imaginary plane through which the Earth moves as it revolves around the Sun; the Earth's obliquity or axial tilt is the angle between these two lines.
The angle θ and axis unit vector e define a rotation, concisely represented by the rotation vector θe.. In mathematics, the axis–angle representation parameterizes a rotation in a three-dimensional Euclidean space by two quantities: a unit vector e indicating the direction of an axis of rotation, and an angle of rotation θ describing the magnitude and sense (e.g., clockwise) of the ...
The equatorial plane is the plane perpendicular to the axis of rotation of the central body. An inclination of 30° could also be described using an angle of 150°. The convention is that the normal orbit is prograde, an orbit in the same direction as the planet rotates. Inclinations greater than 90° describe retrograde orbits (backward). Thus:
The angle of the Earth's axial tilt with respect to the orbital plane (the obliquity of the ecliptic) varies between 22.1° and 24.5°, over a cycle of about 41,000 years. The current tilt is 23.44°, roughly halfway between its extreme values.
Suppose a rectangular xyz-coordinate system is rotated around its z axis counterclockwise (looking down the positive z axis) through an angle , that is, the positive x axis is rotated immediately into the positive y axis. The z coordinate of each point is unchanged and the x and y coordinates transform as above.
3D visualization of a sphere and a rotation about an Euler axis (^) by an angle of In 3-dimensional space, according to Euler's rotation theorem, any rotation or sequence of rotations of a rigid body or coordinate system about a fixed point is equivalent to a single rotation by a given angle about a fixed axis (called the Euler axis) that runs through the fixed point. [6]
The angle θ which appears in the eigenvalue expression corresponds to the angle of the Euler axis and angle representation. The eigenvector corresponding to the eigenvalue of 1 is the accompanying Euler axis, since the axis is the only (nonzero) vector which remains unchanged by left-multiplying (rotating) it with the rotation matrix.
To find the angle of a rotation, once the axis of the rotation is known, select a vector v perpendicular to the axis. Then the angle of the rotation is the angle between v and Rv. A more direct method, however, is to simply calculate the trace: the sum of the diagonal elements of the rotation