Nautical chart always true north, rather than magnetic north, towards which a compass points. Most charts include a compass rose depicting the variation between magnetic and true north. However, the use of the Mercator projection is not without its drawbacks. Mercator's technique was to make the lines of longitude parallel. On the real globe, the lines of longitude converge as one goes north or south away from the equator, until they meet at the pole. This distortion means that horizontal distances are exaggerated. Mercator's solution, imperfect as it might be, was to increase the distance between lines of latitude in proportion; in
Longitude of the periapsis with part of it being measured in the plane of reference and the rest being measured in the plane of the orbit. Likewise, any angle derived from the longitude of periapsis (e.g., mean longitude and true longitude) will also be compound. Sometimes, the term "longitude of periapsis" is used to refer to "ω", the angle between the ascending node and the periapsis. That usage of the term is especially common in discussions of binary stars and exoplanets. However, the angle ω is less ambiguously known as the argument of periapsis. "ϖ" is the sum of the longitude of ascending node