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. 2016 Jun 1;16(6):443–464. doi: 10.1089/ast.2015.1353

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© Aomawa L. Shields, et al., 2016; Published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.

This Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.

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FIG. 1. — Geometry of the elliptical orbit of a body of mass m₂ around m₁. The ellipse has semimajor axis a, semiminor axis b, eccentricity e, and longitude of pericenter ω. The true anomaly f denotes the angle subtended by an imaginary line connecting m₁ with the location of m₂ in its orbit and one connecting m₁ with pericenter (the point of closest approach to m₁). This assumes that m₁ >> m₂.