For all of its excellent merits as a stray light analysis program, APART has not been designed to function as a traditional optical raytracing code, such as ACCOS-V, CODE-V or Synopsis. Raytracing with APART gets tricky, and difficult, when the optical model at the heart of the analysis no longer consists exclusively of conic surfaces of revolution or no longer consists of optics whose vertices are on the optical centerline. A technique is presented here that makes use of non-optical objects, which can be freely ROTATEd and SHIFTed within the last image space in the APART program 1 model. These non-optical objects are free to have curvature, to be second order aspheres (as set by the conic constant) and, unlike a true optical object, to be located anywhere with any orientation.

Date Published: 12 February 1993
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 1753, Stray Radiation in Optical Systems II, (12 February 1993); doi: 10.1117/12.140703

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 1753:
Stray Radiation in Optical Systems II
Robert P. Breault, Editor(s)