Re: (ATM) ray tracing

Clay Spence x3039 (cds@peanut.sarnoff.com)
Fri, 25 Aug 1995 09:15:18 +0500

epabcc@epa.ericsson.se (Bratislav Curcic) wrote: > Clay Spence writes :
>
> > Of course ray-tracing is easy, once you have the program. Take away my
> > fun, will you? <g>
>
> There is a shareware (public domain?) ray tracing program somewhere
> in ATM archives. It is not Zemax (not even Beam), but it will do the
> work.
>
> Bratislav

By fun I meant that I *like* calculating things by hand. Having a formula rather than some numbers can also be more enlightening, although in this case knowing that the coma increases linearly in the third-order expansion is not much more enlightening than doing the ray-tracing for a few different displacements from the axis and noticing that it increases.

Also, I have an Amiga, not a PC. I'm sure there's a ray-tracing program available for the Amiga somewhere. Although I like thinking about optical designs (I've computed the formulas for a two-mirror Schiefspiegler), I don't really need to do ray-tracing yet. For quite a while I'll be struggling to produce a good Newtonian. (I did the Schiefspiegler partly for fun and partly because I couldn't find the formulas published anywhere.)

Clay cspence@sarnoff.com