Spherical conic

In mathematics, a spherical conic or sphero-conic is a curve on the sphere, the intersection of the sphere with a concentric elliptic cone. It is the spherical analog of a conic section in the plane, and as in the planar case, a spherical conic can be defined as the locus of points the sum or difference of whose great-circle distances to two foci is constant. By taking the antipodal point to one focus, every spherical ellipse is also a spherical hyperbola, and vice versa. As a space curve, a spherical conic is a quartic, though its orthogonal projections in three principal axes are planar conics. Like planar conics, spherical conics also satisfy a "reflection property": the great-circle arcs from the two foci to any point on the conic have the tangent and normal to the conic at that point as their angle bisectors.

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