Area Swept- From Focus F1The goal of this section is to provide an equation showing the Area 'A' for the area swept from focus F1 - See Figure 1 below. Note that this will be based on the "Circle Projection" definition of the ellipse.

Figure 1
Deriving this equation is based upon the fact that we already have an equation to determine the area swept from the center vertex given any angle - See Equation 7. To use this equation, we create a vector from the center to the x,y coordinates as shown in Figure 1. We then divide the area into two parts, the area from the center (Ac) and the area of the triangle (At) - See Figure 2 below. Adding these two areas provides the area A = At + Ac.
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Figure 1 |
To use equation 7 to determine the value of Ac, we need to first determine the center angle θ’ which is basically the arctan of y over x, shown here:

Computing the area of the triangle defined by the three points F1, Center, and (x,y). The basic formula for the area of a triangle is used, which is 1/2 the height (y) times the base (c). Note that the value of c is known for any ellipse - See Link: The equation for the triangle portion then (At) is shown as follows:
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| Note that the value of R is derived based on angle θ - See Appendix D. |
For any given ellipse, the area swept from focal point F1, based on some angle θ, is given as:
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| Expanded | ![]() |