ATM Would this design work...

["Benoit Schillings" <benoit@be.com>]

I was thinking this week-end what to do with an undercorrected
mirror... and came up with a (likely stupid) idea ?


A spherical mirror give some pretty bad images but not that bad...
If I remember, a 10 inch spherical at F/6 is something like 40 microns 
star
image due entierly to the spherical abberation.

Why not build a photographic scope using such a mirror and use a
re-imaging lens to reduce the focal length down to F/2 or something,
it seems to me that the star images would then be around 13 microns ?

The field curvature should not be too bad and could be handled with a
field flattner lens or a curved film holder, and (sorry if I wrong) 
there
should not be any coma in the system... just consistently bad stars 
images
reduced to an acceptable size by the re-imaging lens/focal reducer.


This seems way easier to build than most Schmidt scopes, and would be 
sharp
enough for many purpose (drift scan imaging etc...)


Anybody wants to kill my idea ? ;-)


                -- Benoit