APO from the very normal glasses!

This is not a joke This is my recent design 8) It consists of the BK7, F2 and SF11 glasses only.

What do you think?

Arkady

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I have seen similar designs before. How sensitive is this one to alignment of all the elements? Looks like a good possibility for a large apo, but for smaller apos there is too much work involved.

Rolando

It seems like a very beautiful design -- almost magical! Are all the surfaces spherical or do you
need some aspherics to make it work?

I used ATMOS to develop this design in about 15 minutes using the built-in Optimization Routine, starting from flat surfaces. The basic design goes back about 25 years to a fellow that came to Stellafane and tried to interest people in an airspaced apo using only standard glasses (can't remember his name). At the time we did not have powerful programs like ATMOS available to us poor amateurs. Today it is quite possible to design stuff like this in an evening when the rain is coming down and you can't use your scope 8) .

This design is not optimized and can be further developed using less number of elements and corrected over a larger wavelength range. This particular design puts all wavelengths from 656nm to 460nm into the Airy Disc and has very little sphero-chromatism.

Rolando

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