Solid angle of its faces is one-sixth of that, or sr. Solid angles can also be measured in square degrees (1 sr = () square degrees), in square minutes and square seconds, or in fractions of the sphere (1 sr = fractional area), also known as spat (1 sp = 4 sr). In spherical coordinates there is a formula for the differential, where is the colatitude (angle from the North pole) and is the longitude. The solid angle for an arbitrary oriented surface S subtended at a point P is equal to the solid angle of the projection of the surface S
Surface brightness photometric luminance and is therefore constant with distance: as an object becomes fainter with distance, it also becomes correspondingly smaller in visual area. In geometrical terms, for a nearby object emitting a given amount of light, radiative flux decreases with the square of the distance to the object, but the physical area corresponding to a given solid angle or visual area (e.g. 1 square arcsecond) decreases by the same proportion, resulting in the same surface brightness. For extended objects such as nebulae or galaxies, this allows the estimation of spatial distance from surface brightness by means of the distance modulus