Ray Tracing and Aberrations in Lens-like Media

Abstract

The purpose of an optical instrument is to produce perfect images of objects, perfect in the sense that the image completely resembles the object. No single optical instrument is capable of producing exact images of every point of a three-dimensional region, i.e., a situation where all rays starting from any object point converge to a single image point. The departure of the image from perfectness is termed as aberration. In many of the applications of optical instruments one would like to know the aberrations present in the system.