There is also a 7° inclination between the plane of the Sun’s equator and the ecliptic plane. Mercury is the only other planet with a significant inclination of 7°. Until it was stripped of its status as a planet, Pluto was the planet with the most extreme inclination – 17°. The angle between the plane of the ecliptic and the plane of an orbit is called the inclination. The ecliptic plane is used as the main reference when describing the position of other celestial objects in our Solar System. Actually our entire Solar System can be thought of as flat because all of the planets’ orbits are near or on this plane. If you made this ellipse a solid surface and extended it infinitively, then you would have the plane of the ecliptic. The orbit is often shown as an ellipse made of dotted lines with the Sun at its center. The Earth orbits the Sun on a particular angle and its orbit is elliptical in shape. Space is a three-dimensional vacuum, which you can think of as a kind of pool with the planets suspended in it. A basic definition is that the plane of the ecliptic is the plane of the Earth’s orbit, but that does not mean much to most people. Plane of the ecliptic, also known as the ecliptic plane, is a phrase you will often hear in astronomy.
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