Kepler's equation

In orbital mechanics, Kepler's equation relates various geometric properties of the orbit of a body subject to a central force.

It was first derived by Johannes Kepler in 1609 in Chapter 60 of his Astronomia nova, and in book V of his Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (1621) Kepler proposed an iterative solution to the equation. The equation has played an important role in the history of both physics and mathematics, particularly classical celestial mechanics.

Kepler's equation is

$M=E-e\sin E$

where $M$ is the mean anomaly, $E$ is the eccentric anomaly, and $e$ is the eccentricity.

The 'eccentric anomaly' $E$ is useful to compute the position of a point moving in a Keplerian orbit. As for instance, if the body passes the periastron at coordinates $x = a (1 - e)$ , $y = 0$ , at time $t = t 0$ , then to find out the position of the body at any time, you first calculate the mean anomaly $M$ from the time and the mean motion $n$ by the formula $M = n (t - t 0)$ , then solve the Kepler equation above to get $E$ , then get the coordinates from:

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