The art of back-of-the-envelope paraxial raytracing

Author

Rolland, Jannick P. ; Shaoulov, Vesselin ; Gonzalez, F. Javier

Author_Institution

Sch. of Optics/CREOL, Univ. of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

Volume

44

Issue

4

fYear

2001

fDate

11/1/2001 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

365

Lastpage

372

Abstract

Paraxial raytracing is a valuable tool for making quick "back-of-the-envelope" calculations in optical system design. Its popularity has been highly diminished as a consequence of the growing sophistication of computer-aided raytracing and the availability of powerful computers. The availability of raytracing computer programs does not harm in itself the usefulness of graphical raytracing, but it makes people forget, or never learn the basics of graphical raytracing. In this paper, some of the basic concepts of graphical raytracing are presented, along with some examples that illustrate how it can be applied to multielement systems. The mastering of the methods presented in this paper constitute some of the fundamentals required in the use of any optical software. Such knowledge is absolutely necessary for the conception of novel optical systems

Keywords

ray tracing; antiprincipal points; back-of-the-envelope paraxial raytracing; cardinal points; computer-aided raytracing; focal points; geometrical optics; graphical raytracing; hand raytracing; multielement systems; optical system design; principal points; ray sketching; raytracing computer programs; Application software; Associate members; Clocks; Computational modeling; Computer graphics; Computer simulation; Optical propagation; Optical reflection; Optical refraction; Subspace constraints;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Education, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9359

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/13.965785

Filename

965785