Optical engine optimisation for faint starlight simulation systems

Abstract

In traditional faint starlight simulators, stray light interference prevents the accurate magnitude simulation of weak stars. In this study, we propose a method to optimise the parameters of the optical engine to suppress stray light. The results from a simulated model of the system’s point source transmittance (PST) and incident off-axis and azimuth angles show the optimised design to have a PST value that is nearly five times higher than that of a traditional system. The performance of the optimised system was evaluated using the detector’s signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and magnitude. Moreover, polarisation aberration was used to derive the optimised index, and experimental results show the optimised simulation error of the new system to be less than 0.1 Mi, thus confirming the accuracy of our theoretical research.