Abstract

The design of complex lens systems is a tiresome and time-consuming work of successive trigonometric light path calculations, each leading to a new lens bending, air space modification, etc. It can take thousands of man-hours.

A direct process which gives at once the proper lens bending (perhaps the best) and the surfaces’ radii, cuts the design work to a small fraction of the classical calculation time. This is the case in this direct process for which a few initial hints are given here.

When the primitive data are related by geometric optics to the entrance and exit pupils, field, aperture, object and image positions, this process leads at once to right results. Generally, they are already good for practical use; when extremely corrected lens systems are needed, it happens that only one partial bending is sufficient to compensate the residual aberrations.

Basis of this new design process is a new equation for achromatization into which enter the lens thicknesses, air spaces, refraction indexes, image position. When data are properly chosen, it is a very rapid job to get the curvature radii of all the optical surfaces.

© 1949 Optical Society of America

Color Correction in Optical Systems and Types of Glass*

M. Herzberger and H. Jenkins
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 39(12) 984-989 (1949)

The Color Correction of an Achromatic Doublet

T. Townsend Smith
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 10(1) 39-63 (1925)

The General Theory of Isoplanatism for Finite Aperture and Field

Mario Di Jorio
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 39(4) 305-319 (1949)

The Aberrations of Slightly Decentered Optical Systems*

L. Ivan Epstein
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 39(10) 847-853 (1949)

A New Series of Microscope Objectives: I. Catadioptric Newtonian Systems*

David S. Grey and Paul H. Lee
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 39(9) 719-722 (1949)