1 June 2006 Balancing detector effects with aberrations in the design of wide-field grazing incidence x-ray telescopes
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
Most imaging systems today include a mosaic detector array in the focal plane. Optical designers of astronomical telescopes typically produce a design that yields a superb on-axis aerial image in the focal plane, and detector effects are included only in the analysis of the final system performance. Aplanatic optical designs (corrected for spherical aberration and coma) are widely considered to be superior to nonaplanatic designs. However, there is little merit in an aplanatic design for wide-field applications because one needs to optimize some field-weighted-average measure of resolution over the desired operational field of view (OFOV). Furthermore, when used with a mosaic detector array in the focal plane, detector effects eliminate the advantage of the aplanatic design even at small field angles. For wide fields of view, the focal plane is frequently despaced to balance field curvature with defocus thus obtaining better overall performance. We will demonstrate that including detector effects in the optical design process results in a different optimal (nonaplanatic) design for each OFOV that is even superior to an optimally despaced aplanatic design.
©(2006) Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)
James E. Harvey, Martina Atanassova, and Andrey Krywonos "Balancing detector effects with aberrations in the design of wide-field grazing incidence x-ray telescopes," Optical Engineering 45(6), 063003 (1 June 2006). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.2209215
Published: 1 June 2006
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CITATIONS
Cited by 6 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Sensors

Monochromatic aberrations

Optical design

Optical instrument design

X-ray telescopes

Grazing incidence

Image quality

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