Abstract

Soon after launch it was discovered that the Hubble Space Telescope suffers from a large amount of spherical aberration which blurs the images it produces and reduces their contrast. It is important to very accurately determine those aberrations (phase errors) in order to (1) design correction optics which, when installed in the telescope, will compensate for the aberration, (2) compute point-spread functions (PSFs) which can be used to deblur the degraded images received until the correction optics are installed, and (3) align the secondary mirror of the Optical Telescope Assembly (OTA—the main telescope).

© 1992 Optical Society of America