A prime focus corrector design for liquid mirror telescope

Kexin Li; Lixin Zheng; Changshun Liu; Xiao Li; Zhenghong Tang

doi:10.1117/12.2504951

11 January 2019 A prime focus corrector design for liquid mirror telescope

Kexin Li, Lixin Zheng, Changshun Liu, Xiao Li, Zhenghong Tang

Proceedings Volume 10837, 9th International Symposium on Advanced Optical Manufacturing and Testing Technologies: Large Mirrors and Telescopes; 108370E (2019) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2504951
Event: Ninth International Symposium on Advanced Optical Manufacturing and Testing Technologies (AOMATT2018), 2018, Chengdu, China

Abstract

Liquid rotating about a vertical axis takes a parabolic form, and can be used as the primary mirror in a reflecting telescope. It is a convenient way to get big primary mirror for astronomical telescope. But this kind of Newton type telescope with a parabolic surface has limited field of view, which is not capable for the detection of astronomical and orbital objects. It is necessary to design corrector lens with large field of view to improve the detection efficiency. In this paper, a prime focus corrector with a field of view of 2°, a focal length of 1.5 m, and wavelength coverage of 0.4-0.8 μm is designed for a liquid telescope with a clear aperture of 1 meter. The corrector is optimized by choosing different types of glass for achromatic design. The final corrector consists of 5 lenses and one filter, in which the largest one has a clear aperture of 280 mm and there is only one conic surface is used on a concave lens. The design result shows that 80% encircled energy is limited in one pixel, that is 12 μm for our F9000 3K×3K CCD camera, corresponding to 1.67″ resolution. The distortion is optimized to 0.01% which is very suitable for a Time Delay Integration (TDI) observation. The tolerance analysis for fabrication and assembly is also presented. Space debris and astronomical objects will be observed when the telescope is constructed.

Citation Download Citation

Kexin Li, Lixin Zheng, Changshun Liu, Xiao Li, and Zhenghong Tang "A prime focus corrector design for liquid mirror telescope", Proc. SPIE 10837, 9th International Symposium on Advanced Optical Manufacturing and Testing Technologies: Large Mirrors and Telescopes, 108370E (11 January 2019); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2504951

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