Circle of a sphere the Equator the only great circle. By contrast, all meridians of longitude, paired with their opposite meridian in the other hemisphere, form great circles. The diameter of the sphere which passes through the center of the circle is called its axis and the endpoints of this diameter are called its poles. A circle of a sphere can also be defined as the set of points at a given angular distance from a given pole. When the intersection of a sphere and a plane is not empty or a single point, it is a circle. This can be seen as follows:
Sublunary sphere - the idea usually going hand in hand with geocentrism and the concept of a spherical Earth. Avicenna carried forward into the Middle Ages the Aristotelian idea of generation and corruption being limited to the sublunary sphere. Medieval scholastics like Thomas Aquinas - who charted the division between celestial and sublunary spheres in his work "Summa Theologica" - also drew on Cicero and Lucan for an awareness of the great frontier between Nature and Sky, sublunary and aetheric spheres. The result for medieval/Renaissance mentalities was a pervasive awareness of the existence, at the Moon, of what C.S. Lewis called 'this