Design of off-axis aspheric four-mirror non-axial mechanical zoom optical system with large relative aperture

Abstract

A large relative aperture is essential to improve the spatial resolution of zoom systems. To overcome the limitations of the existing off-axis reflective mechanical zoom system with a low zoom rate and a small relative aperture, this paper proposes a non-axis movement method for increasing the degrees of freedom. On the basis of nodal aberration theory, passive eccentricity is changed into active eccentricity to achieve wave aberration balance in the multiple structures of the zoom imaging system. An off-axis aspherical four-mirror non-axial mechanical zoom optical system is designed and fabricated. The prototype has been successfully processed and assembled with the help of computer-aided alignment technology. The prototype’s F-number is 4 and zoom ratio is 4.57:1. Experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed method.