Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision
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J Opt Soc Am A Opt Image Sci Vis · Nov 2010
System design considerations to improve isoplanatism for adaptive optics retinal imaging.
Adaptive optics (AO) retinal images are limited by anisoplanatism; wavefront shape varies across the field of view such that only a limited area can achieve diffraction-limited image quality at one time. We explored three alternative AO modalities designed to reduce this effect, drawn from work in astronomy. Optical design analysis and computer modeling was undertaken to predict the benefit of each modality for various schematic eyes and various complexities of the imaging system. ⋯ Mirror-based relay optics also demonstrated good off-axis performance, but their advantage was lost in regions of the system suffering from uncorrected higher-order aberration. Incorporating "off-the-plane" beam deviations ameliorated this loss substantially. In this work we also show, to our knowledge for the first time, that the ideal location of a single AO corrector need not lie in the pupil plane.