A purely reflective large wide-field telescope

TL;DR

This paper introduces two designs of a large, purely reflective, wide-field telescope with high image quality, using novel surface types and configurations to optimize performance for an 8.4-m aperture system.

Contribution

It presents two innovative telescope mirror surface designs—one based on traditional aspheres and the other on polysag surfaces—that improve image quality and field flatness.

Findings

The 8.4-m telescope achieves D80 star image diameters of 0.18'' to 0.27''

Polysag surface design yields better images with D80 from 0.16'' to 0.23''

A smaller 3.5-m version with near-diffraction-limited images is also demonstrated.

Abstract

Two versions of a fast, purely reflective Paul-Baker type telescope are discussed, each with an 8.4-m aperture, 3 deg diameter flat field and f/1.25 focal ratio. The first version is based on a common, even asphere type of surface with zero conic constant. The primary and tertiary mirrors are 6th order aspheres, while the secondary mirror is an 8th order asphere (referred to here for brevity, as the 6/8/6 configuration). The D_80 diameter of a star image varies from 0''.18 on the optical axis up to 0''.27 at the edge of the field (9.3-13.5 mcm). The second version of the telescope is based on a polysag surface type which uses a polynomial expansion in the sag z, r^2 = 2R_0z - (1+b)z^2 + a_3 z^3 + a_4 z^4 + ... + a_N z^N, instead of the common form of an aspheric surface. This approach results in somewhat better images, with D_80 ranging from 0''.16 to 0''.23, using a lower-order 3/4/3 combination of powers for the mirror surfaces. An additional example with 3.5-m aperture, 3.5 deg diameter flat field, and f/1.25 focal ratio featuring near-diffraction-limited image quality is also presented.