Optical Property and Alighment of KAO Wide Field Telescope (NEOPAT-3)

Abstract

We have investigated the optical property of the KAO(Korea Astronomy Observatory) wide field telescope (named NEOPAT-3; Near Earth Object and Satellite Patrol-3) and aligned optical system. The NEOPAT-3 is restricted to V,R,I-filters because of the refractive property of the correcting lens system. Because of the fast focal ratio, the optical performance of the NEOPAT-3 is very sensitive to its alignment factors of the optical system. To make the spot radius smaller than 8μm in rms over 2degree×2degree field, the optical system must satisfy the following conditions: 1) The tilt error between detector plane and focal plane should be less than 0.05degree. 2) The decenter error between the primary mirror and the correcting lens system should be less than 1mm. 3) The distance error between the primary mirror and the correcting lens system should be less than 2.3mm. In order to align the optical system accurately, we measured the aberrations of the telescope quantitatively by means of curvature sensing technique. NEOPAT-3 is installed temporary on the roof of the TRAO(Taeduk Radio Astronomy Observatory) main building to normalize system performance and to develop automatic observation.

Keywords

• telescopes
• aberrations