Designing a sky-scanning Fabry–Perot interferometer system with a large size integrating sphere

Abstract

Integrating spheres can be manufactured at sizes ranging from 1 mm to 3 m in diameter. It has been agreed widely by manufacturers that fitting a large-sized integrating sphere as per the customer requirement is a complex process. Thus, these spheres due to its large beam divergence from the exit port, have never been deployed for the calibration of aeronomy applications. In this article a optical system is described to integrate a large-sized integrating sphere with the Fabry–Perot etalon and thus devise a set-up to generate the concentric ring pattern and record it on the detector. The experimental set-up was verified by optical simulation using ZEMAX (OpticStudio) so as to validate the system’s performance in the laboratory. The important parameter finesse is calculated and its accuracy is found to be 80%.

Keywords

• Integrating sphere
• CCD
• Optical simulation