Kingslake R., Johnson R. Barry. Lens Design Fundamentals

2nd edition. — SPIE PRESS, 2010. — 549 p.Many young optical engineers today are designing lenses with the aid of an optimization program on a large computer, but they have little appreciation of the how and why of lens behavior, particularly as these computer programs tend to ignore many of the classical lens types that have been found satisfactory for almost a century. Anyone who has had the experience of designing lenses by hand is able to make much better use of an optimization program than someone who has just entered the field, even though that newcomer may have an excellent academic background and be an expert in computer operation. For this reason an up-to-date text dealing with the classical processes of lens design will always be of value. The best that a computer can do is to optimize the system given to it, so the more understanding and competent the designer, the better the starting system he will be able to give the computer. A perceptive preliminary study of a system will often indicate how many solutions exist in theory and which one is likely to yield the best final form.
A large part of this book is devoted to a study of possible design procedures for various types of lens or mirror systems, with fully worked examples of each. The reader is urged to follow the logic of these examples and be sure that he understands what is happening, noticing particularly how each available degree of freedom is used to control one aberration. Not every type of lens has been considered, of course, but the design techniques illustrated here can be readily applied to the design of other, more complex systems. It is assumed that the reader has access to a small computer to help with the ray tracing; otherwise, he may find the computations so time-consuming that he is liable to lose track of what he is trying to accomplish.The Work of the Lens Designer
Meridional Ray Tracing
Paraxial Rays and First-Order Optics
Aberration Theory
Chromatic Aberration
Spherical Aberration
Design of a Spherically Corrected Achromat
Oblique Beams
Coma and the Sine Condition
Design of Aplanatic Objectives
The Oblique Aberrations
Lenses in Which Stop Position Is a Degree of Freedom
Symmetrical Double Anastigmats with Fixed Stop
Unsymmetrical Photographic Objectives
Mirror and Catadioptric Systems
Eyepiece Design
Automatic Lens Improvement Programs