Solid angle corresponds to one unit of area on the unit sphere surrounding the apex, so an object that blocks all rays from the apex would cover a number of steradians equal to the total surface area of the unit sphere, formula_1. Solid angles can also be measured in squares of angular measures such as degrees, minutes, and seconds. A small object nearby may subtend the same solid angle as a larger object farther away. For example, although the Moon is much smaller than the Sun, it is also much closer to Earth. Indeed, as viewed from any point on Earth, both
Degrees of freedom (mechanics) rotation, which means that it has six degrees of freedom. The exact constraint mechanical design method manages the degrees of freedom to neither underconstrain nor overconstrain a device. The position of an "n"-dimensional rigid body is defined by the rigid transformation, ["T"] = ["A", "d"], where "d" is an "n"-dimensional translation and "A" is an "n" × "n" rotation matrix, which has "n" translational degrees of freedom and "n"("n" − 1)/2 rotational degrees of freedom. The number of rotational degrees of freedom comes from the dimension of the rotation group SO(n). A non-rigid or deformable body may be thought of