What is a Hybrid Angle? I'm looking at the Wikipedia content surrounding the calculating the position of the sun relative to the earth, and I came across the term "hybrid angle." (Emphasis added.) > Mean longitude is the ecliptic longitude at which an orbiting body could be found if its orbit were circular and free of perturbations. While nominally a simple longitude, in practice the mean longitude is a **hybrid angle**. > > \-- Wikipedia entry for Mean Longitude Is "hybrid angle" a mathematical term, or does it simply mean an angle calculated with some variable adjustment to its input?

I edited the article to remove "hybrid angle", which seems overly vague. It now reads

> While nominally a simple longitude, in practice the mean longitude does not correspond to any one physical angle.

Later on there is a comment:

> Mean longitude, like mean anomaly, does not measure an angle between any physical objects. It is simply a convenient uniform measure of how far around its orbit a body has progressed since passing the reference direction.

The mean longitude is defined as a sum of three physical angles - longitude of the ascending node, argument of the pericentre, mean anomaly - and the former "hybrid" designation stemmed from this sum.