Abstract

The optical system of an emmetropic human eye is far from being diffraction limited. That is why in many clinical applications and psychophysics experiments ophthalmologists do not obtain maximum resolution of human retina in a wide field-of view. The ability of adaptive optics to improve on-axis resolution leads to decreasing the resolution of the rest of retina image. In other words even in case of ideal corrector that fully compensates for all aberrations image quality is still degraded by the effect of anisoplanatism. It means that it is impossible to get high resolution within entire field-of-view of retinal image by means of single corrector that compensates aberrations of a point source located at the fovea. In other words, if angular distance between the imaged object and the beacon (a point source formed on the retina) is greater than θ₀ (called the isoplanatic angle) the wavefronts from the object and from the beacon considerably differ from each other and it is impossible to compensate both wavefronts by means of one corrector. The size of isoplanatic angle depends on the off-axis performance of human eye. In this paper we estimate the size of isoplanatic angle of real human eye and consider methods for increasing it. For that purpose we apply the formalism of anisoplanatism developed for atmosphere turbulence to a human eye.

© 2007 IEEE