Hour angle The angle may be measured in degrees or in time, with 24 = 360° exactly. In astronomy, hour angle is defined as the angular distance on the celestial sphere measured westward along the celestial equator from the meridian to the hour circle passing through a point. It may be given in degrees, time, or rotations depending on the application. In celestial navigation, the convention is to measure in degrees westward from the prime meridian (Greenwich hour angle, GHA), from the local meridian (local hour angle, LHA) or from the first point of Aries (sidereal hour angle, SHA). The hour angle
Degrees of freedom (statistics) degrees of freedom. In some complicated settings, such as unbalanced split-plot designs, the sums-of-squares no longer have scaled chi-squared distributions. Comparison of sum-of-squares with degrees-of-freedom is no longer meaningful, and software may report certain fractional 'degrees of freedom' in these cases. Such numbers have no genuine degrees-of-freedom interpretation, but are simply providing an "approximate" chi-squared distribution for the corresponding sum-of-squares. The details of such approximations are beyond the scope of this page. Several commonly encountered statistical distributions (Student's t, Chi-Squared, F) have parameters that are commonly referred to as "degrees of freedom". This terminology simply reflects that in many applications