On Improving the Effectiveness of Large Telescopes

Abstract

A family of two-mirror correctors has been devised in a more advanced form than that obtained by Paul in 1935. These correctors can be used in combination with any paraboloidal telescope of even the largest size and will yield a greatly enlarged photographic field without the need for refracting elements of any kind. Such correctors will be of particular use in the ultraviolet, and for space-borne telescopes into the far ultraviolet, with performance limited only by diffraction over angular fields appreciably larger than available heretofore.

An off-axis telescope concept for Antarctic astronomy

“…A three-mirror decentered Paul-Baker (Paul, 1935;Baker, 1969) system is our guideline concept reference, where some variation on the shape of the three mirrors is allowed to achieve good image quality across a wide field of view. One of the main constraints during such optimizations is the necessity to have compact designs, making it possible to be installed on top of a ~23m high (or higher) tower to overcome the boundary layer developed some 2m above ice and up to 23m (Gredel 2009).…”

New designs of survey telescopes

“…The only serious shortcoming was the curved field. The modifications necessary to eliminate this fault were found by Baker (1969), so the final system is usually named the Paul-Baker telescope (PB telescope).…”

A purely reflective large wide-field telescope

“…Examples presented below show that polysag surfaces of relatively low order allow one to design large and fast telescopes with high image quality. However, this type of surface is not universal, as sometimes it is better to treat a surface, with the aid of equation (3). An example is the corrector plate for a Schmidt camera; perhaps, the reason is that the spherical aberration of a sphere is determined just by power terms in the radial coordinate and not in the sag.…”

“…The special attention was given to further development of the Mersenne [1636] system in a direction specified by Schmidt [1930], resulting in a three-mirror telescope system. The important milestones on this path were the works of Paul [1935], Baker [1969], Willstrop [1984], and Angel et. al.…”

“…An excellent aberration-free solution by Korsch [1972Korsch [ , 1977 provides the flat-field three-mirror designs in a frame of theory of 3rd-order aberrations, i.e., for the relatively slow systems. It was shown by Baker [1969] that a flat field could be attained with a fast three-mirror telescope proposed by Paul [1935] (see the general discussion in the book by Schroeder [2000], §6.4).…”