Galactic Coordinate System

The galactic coordinate system is a celestial coordinate system in spherical coordinates, with the Sun as its center, a primary direction aligned with the approximate center of the Milky Way galaxy, and a fundamental plane approximately in the galactic plane. It has a right-handed convention, meaning that coordinates are positive toward the north and toward the east in the fundamental plane.

See also: List of celestial bodies by galactic coordinate system

Read more about Galactic Coordinate System:  Galactic Longitude, Galactic Latitude, Definition, Rectangular Coordinates, In The Constellations

Famous quotes containing the words galactic and/or system:

    In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn’t developed space travel were mere prehistory—horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene—and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.
    Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)

    We recognize caste in dogs because we rank ourselves by the familiar dog system, a ladderlike social arrangement wherein one individual outranks all others, the next outranks all but the first, and so on down the hierarchy. But the cat system is more like a wheel, with a high-ranking cat at the hub and the others arranged around the rim, all reluctantly acknowledging the superiority of the despot but not necessarily measuring themselves against one another.
    —Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. “Strong and Sensitive Cats,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1994)