Misalignment-induced nodal aberration fields in two-mirror astronomical telescopes

    Authors

    T. Schmid; K. P. Thompson;J. P. Rolland

    Comments

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    Abbreviated Journal Title

    Appl. Optics

    Keywords

    OPTICAL-SYSTEMS; ROTATIONAL SYMMETRY; Optics

    Abstract

    We present the effects of misalignments on the field dependence of the third-order aberration fields of traditional, two-mirror astronomical telescopes in the context of nodal aberration theory, which we believe is the most general and extensible framework for describing and improving on-station performance. While many of the advantages of nodal aberration theory, compared to other, often power series expansion-based descriptions of misalignment effects on aberrations, become particularly important when analyzing telescopes with more than two mirrors, or in the presence of figure errors; this paper aims to provide and demonstrate the fundamental concepts needed to fully describe the state of correction of misaligned two-mirror telescopes. Importantly, it is shown that the assumption that perfect performance on axis ensures a fully aligned telescope is false, and we demonstrate that if Ritchey-Chretien telescopes are aligned for zero coma on axis as the sole criterion, formidable misalignments will likely remain, leading to image quality degradation, particularly beyond midfield caused by astigmatism with binodal field dependence (i.e., astigmatism goes to zero at two points in the field). (C) 2010 Optical Society of America

    Journal Title

    Applied Optics

    Volume

    49

    Issue/Number

    16

    Publication Date

    1-1-2010

    Document Type

    Article

    Language

    English

    First Page

    D131

    Last Page

    D144

    WOS Identifier

    WOS:000278265600045

    ISSN

    1559-128X

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