Cartesian vector to polar angles conversion.

[phi,theta] = vec2ang(x)

This function converts cartesian coordinates to polar angles. Given one or more cartesian column vectors in x, vec2ang returns the corresponding polar angles phi and theta, both in radians.

phi denotes the counterclockwise angle between the x axis and the projection of a vector onto the xy plane (azimuth), theta is the angle between a vector and the z axis (polar angle, colatitude, elevation complement).

x must be a 3xN array, since vectors are assumed to be along columns. The vectors can have arbitrary length.

A set of vectors with linearly increasing z coordinate gives polar angles, where theta is not linearly decreasing.

x = ones(3,6);
x(3,:) = linspace(0,9,6);
[p,t] = vec2ang(x); t*180/pi

ans =
   90.0000   38.1558   21.4467   14.6757   11.1125    8.9301

ang2vec, erot, eulang