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Lens Aberrations: Avoiding Defects in Imagery

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A perfect lens can produce a perfect image. But seven primary lens aberrations can blur or distort the image instead, and they should be considered when creating an optical system.

Bruce H. Walker, Walker Associates

A lens collects light from a point on an object and focuses it to a corresponding conjugate point on an image. Under most conditions, the lens fails at this task because of some error in the precision with which it focuses this light. Rather than a true point image, the lens produces a blur circle. It is the function of the optical designer to assure that this blur circle is sufficiently small to allow the required resolution or image quality. The inability of a lens to form a perfect image is caused by lens aberrations. The following paragraphs will describe the seven aberrations and discuss...Read full article

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    Glossary
    astigmatism
    A lens aberration that results in the tangential and sagittal image planes being separated axially.
    coma
    A lens aberration, resulting from different magnifications in the various lens zones, that occurs in that part of the image field that is some distance from the principal axis of the system. Extra-axial object points appear as short cometlike images with the brighter small head toward the center of the field (positive coma) or away from the center (negative coma).
    astigmatismFeaturesFilterscomaoptical componentsspherical aberrationsOpticslenses

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