Optical system for extremely large spectroscopic survey telescope

TL;DR

This paper designs a large-aperture, wide-field spectroscopic survey telescope with a pure reflecting optical system and an atmospheric dispersion corrector, achieving the largest etendue and focal surface for such telescopes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel design for a large, wide-field spectroscopic telescope using a four-mirror Nasmyth system with an innovative atmospheric dispersion corrector, enabling larger aperture and field of view.

Findings

Achieved a 2.5° FOV with excellent image quality.

Designed a 12-m telescope scalable to 16-m with maximum etendue.

Developed a subsequent coudé system with high image quality.

Abstract

This article presents research work on a spectroscopic survey telescope. Our idea is as follows: for such a telescope, a pure reflecting optical system is designed, which should have an aperture and a field of view (FOV) both as large as possible and excellent image quality, and then a strip lensm (lens-prism) atmospheric dispersion corrector (S-ADC) is added, only for correcting the atmospheric dispersion. Given the fund limitation and the simplicity of scaling up, some 12-m telescopes are designed as examples. Su, Korsch, and Meinel put forward the four-mirror Nasmyth systems I and II, which are used in this paper. FOVs of 1.5{\deg}, 2{\deg}, and 2.5{\deg} are selected. For all systems, the image qualities are excellent. Because the S-ADC relaxes the optical glass size restriction, this 12-m telescope with a FOV of 2.5{\deg} can be magnified in proportion to a 16-m telescope. Its etendue (from French \'etendue) and focal surface will now be the largest in the world. In such a telescope, a pure reflecting optical system can also be obtained. A subsequent coud\'e system is designed with excellent image quality.