Observations from teaching and learning over a 50 year span in various venues are made. The emphasis is on optics/photonics, but excursions are made into lower frequency electro-magnetic waves. Night-school students have priorities and necessities that are different from full-time students, visiting foreign students have another goal, graduate students (and their supervisors!) have a focus on research, contractual programs and short-course participants have specific interests in equipment and projects. The requirements place different demands on timing, assignments, emphasis, etc, for the lecture/ teaching/ laboratory aspects of the programs. Lessons that have been learned over the years are outlined.
Buried in the Land Forces Technical Staff Program, a one-year program within Applied Military Science, AMS, at the Royal Military College of Canada, is a set of 27 lectures in optics and photonics. The lectures, spread over 1½ months, are organized and presented to 22 participants each year, Captains and Majors, to give an appreciation of: thermal imagers, image intensifiers, laser designators, atmospheric characteristics, and many of the basic concepts associated with the detection, identification, and recognition, of targets. Discussion is provided of the difficulties associated with this program.
A two-week short course in optics and photonics was organized and presented at the Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, ON, from 1988 to 1995. It was designed for personnel in the Canadian Forces who were entering management positions that required some understanding of optics and photonics. The course attracted between 15 to 22 participants every year; individuals came from the ranks of Warrant Officer, through to L/Col, as well as civilian. Variations and improvements were made over the years. A history of events: the course, the personnel, the circumstances, the financing, some of the difficulties and successes, are presented. Much good will, trust, and integrity, were needed by all to bring it to fruition. Suggestions are given.
An optics and photonics post-graduate degree program is described that was organized, offered, and presented, at the Royal Military College of Canada between the years of 1976 to the present. While the author retired in 1998, one or more of the courses: Fundamentals of Photonics, Fourier Spectroscopy and Fourier Optics, Electro-Optical Systems, Radiation Heat Transfer, and/or Advanced Instrumentation, continued to be offered/given in the Division of Graduate Studies and Research. The most recent PhD thesis was completed this past year. The history, together with the problems and successes associated with the program at RMC are described. Recommendations are made.
A radiometer has been designed that operates at 1064 nanometers using a diffractive element arrangement to focus the energy onto a detector array. The aperture is made up of several elements consisting of both on and off-axis designed elements arranged to provide an overall FOV. The blur circle and the efficiency of the elements have been measured. The advantages of DOEs are weight saving, repetitiveness of design, the making of either off-axis or on-axis elements with the same ease, good efficiency of energy collection, and diffraction limited focusing.
The classical rangefinder that uses two telescopes separated by
a fixed base distance so as to produce a parallax-angle difference when pointed
at a source of interest to determine the range, has been used as the basis of a
passive electro-optic range and azimuth finder. The concept, shown in Figure 1,
uses: two silicon photodiode focal plane arrays (FPA) each incorporating 256X256
elements (each element being 40 I.tm by 40 tm) , two standard telephoto lenses, two
video data formatters (VDF) , two TV monitors for convenience in operating the
system (not shown) , two high-speed waveform digitisers, each with a 128 K memory
data storage facility, and a host computer driven by algorithms for determining
the range and azimuth. The determination takes about six minutes.
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