Optical design and analysis program

Abstract

An optical design and analysis program structured for operation on a minicomputer has been developed at NRC (National Research Council of Canada). It has been designed to be used interactively giving the user both flexibility and ease of operation. The computer on which it runs at present is a Digital PDP11 with a memory of around 28K, and this represents a great saving in computer costs when compared with those of a large computer upon which most lens design work is carried out. This program has capabilities for optimizing a lens system, for pupil exploration, for fitting the computed wavefront aberration to a polynomial, and for evaluating the diffraction optical transfer function. Although only ten finite rays are traced in the optimization routine, the aberrations computed, together with the Seidel aberrations obtained from the paraxial ray trace, provide the user with adequate control of the aberrations over both aperture and field. A Double Gauss and a Maksutov-Cassegrain system are used as practical examples to illustrate this.