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A secant plane is a plane containing a nontrivial section of a sphere or an ellipsoid, or such a plane that a sphere is projected onto. Secant planes are similar to tangent planes, which contact the sphere's surface at a point, while secant planes contact the surface along curves.
The two-dimensional representations of secant planes are secant lines, the lines that join two distinct points on a curve.
Applications
Secant planes are used in map projections. The secant plane intersects a globe along a small circle with no distortion, forming a standard parallel which has true scale.
References
Secant plane Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA