Flattening
Flattening is a measure of the compression of a circle or sphere along a diameter to form an ellipse or an ellipsoid of revolution (spheroid) respectively. Other terms used are ellipticity, or oblateness. The usual notation for flattening is and its definition in terms of the semi-axes and of the resulting ellipse or ellipsoid is
"Ellipticity" redirects here. For ellipticity in differential calculus, see elliptic operator. For other uses, see Flattening (disambiguation).
The compression factor is in each case; for the ellipse, this is also its aspect ratio.
