Study on creating an aspheric primary mirror of a large telescope using spherical mirror segments

Abstract

Use of aspheric mirrors is common practice to design astronomical telescope with just a few optical elements. For an example in the most preferred telescope optical design, Ritchy Chretien (RC) both primary and secondary mirrors are hyperbola. Nowadays large telescopes are being built using small mirror segments, however, making aspheric off-axis mirror segment is a challenge. We have conducted a study in which we have explored a possibility to mimic aspheric hyperbolic primary mirror by making use of smaller spherical mirror segments. In this paper we present results of our study on designing an RC type telescope optics for an 10m class optical-NIR telescope