In the next couple of articles, we will talk about the different instrumentation used by ophthalmologists and optometrists. As you can imagine, there are many restrictions when designing an optical instrument that will be used in a patient. It matters whether the...
This is our last entry on our scanning mirrors series. In this article, we will talk about the use of scanning mirrors when working with welding environments. As you can imagine, not only do the optical requirements differ when compared to those of a scanning...
This is our third installment of a four-series blogs about steering mirrors. We have talked previously about steering mirrors in laser markings and steering mirrors in OCT systems. This week, we will talk about the steering mirror requirements for those in LIDAR...
This week, we will continue our discussion of fast steering mirrors. If you missed our last article, go ahead and read about steering mirrors for laser marking. Here, we will discuss the design requirements for steering mirrors in Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT)....
In the next couple of weeks, we will be talking about the different design requirements and restrictions when working with steering mirrors, also known as scanning mirrors. The objective is to show you that different applications require different solutions, and that...
Introduction In previous entries, we have talked about the design of scanning microscopes, infinity corrected microscopes, confocal microscope design, and Koehler illumination systems-a common illumination system in microscopes. The most essential microscope element...
Endoscopes are medical devices designed to collect the smallest images from inside the human body. Endoscopes can be divided into two categories: rigid endoscopes, in which relay lenses are stacked together generally creating a high-quality image, and flexible...
When I was a young undergrad engineering student, I always found optics to be a very confusing subject. It was not only the equations, but what it looked like hundreds of different definitions involved in even the simplest of optical systems. Some concepts, like...
Previous posts have reviewed different techniques for beam homogenization as well as the difference between spot size and beam angle. This post will review a method for beam shaping using Powell Lenses. Powell lenses are lenses that create a straight laser line by...
The choice of glass is a fundamental part in the optical design process. This is especially true for IR and thermal optics materials. In this article, we will review Calcium Fluoride (CaF2), an interesting glass that has a wide range of applications. Before we start,...
Beam splitters are a fundamental element in optical systems. Beam splitters are, in essence, optical components used to divide a single light source (usually a laser) into two separate beams. The more common kind of beam splitters (the kind that you can find in most...
As optical engineers, we are in charge of more than just the design and implementation of optical systems for specific applications: we often need to evaluate optical systems’ performance or to assess the quality of optical components. To do these assessments, we...
A conoscopic lens is an instrument that can be used to measure the angular distribution of a light source. Its use is quite different from a lens, as in photography. An image created by a conoscopic lens resembles that of a fisheye lens. That is a...
When designing any optical system, an optical engineer needs to consider how illumination will be used: specifically, how the illumination could affect the way the image is created. If not carefully designed, some illumination systems may create a kind of...
Among the many lens design configurations, one of the most common lens optical layouts is the Tessar Lens. This layout was created by Paul Rudolph in 1902 for photographic lenses. In the golden age of film photography, the...
There are different ways to calculate the quality of a laser beam. In general, we want our laser beam to be as close to a theoretical Gaussian Beam as possible. The question then is how do we measure the profile of our beam and how do we compare it against our ideal...
Confocal microscopy is a very popular technique for high-quality images. It is useful when working with tissue or bio-samples due to the relatively simple sample preparation. While in a traditional microscope we have a wide field where most of the elements at the...
Projection systems are one of the most common consumer optical devices (probably second to photographic systems). They allow us to view images on a screen (usually) by magnifying and projecting them at distances from a few centimeters to several meters away...
Anyone who has peaked through a hotel room peephole has used a fish eye lens. Usually, the fish eye lens has a very short focal length (less than 15mm for a 35mm-size image sensor), but a large field of view (FOV). The latter can be as large as...
Parabolic mirrors are optical systems that are used to collect or distribute energy. They have a wide range of applications from solar collectors for water heating systems to microscopes and telescopes, and everyday flashlights. The most common way ...
Screen Scratch Detection System
Phase Shift Method for distance measurement
Scheimpflug principle