Zemax & Optics Essentials: Learn Imaging the Easy Way

Explains how a lens creates an image from an object by showing how point sources, pinhole, and camera obscura concepts separate mixed light, and how distance and aperture affect imaging.

Explore how camera obscura uses a pinhole to project scenes for drawing, and how decreasing pinhole diameter improves image quality in simple geometry optics.

Explore the brightness versus image quality trade-off in pinhole imaging, showing how smaller diameters sharpen images but reduce available energy and light, while larger diameters boost brightness but blur detail.

Spot size determines image quality in Zemax imaging; decreasing the pinhole diameter yields a smaller spot size and more information, but lowers image brightness.

Pinhole imaging shows how pinhole diameter sets the spot size, trading image quality for brightness; the lecture questions how to combine high quality with brightness.

Use a lens to collect light and focus it into a tiny spot, delivering bright images with good quality and resolving the pinhole trade-off.

Explore how imaging maps every object point to a corresponding image point, and how rotational symmetry lets you simplify field evaluation to on-axis and edge-of-field points in Zemax.

Explore how the edge of the field stop limits imaging by tying the CCD size to the image circle, defining the maximum field.

Explain axial symmetry and axial points in lens design, highlighting edge and center field points and how rotational symmetry creates a consistent field across the system.

Identify midfield as the key middle field point and place three representative points on axis, edge, and midfield, using the 0.7 height rule to optimize aberrations with limited computation.

Explore a simple optical system built from a single lens, detailing the object distance, image inversion, radii of curvature, center thickness, and bk7 material, and recreate the lens in Zemax.

Navigate the Zemax interface for sequential optical systems, using system explorer and lens data editor to set wavelength, aperture, and field of view, and apply optimizers to refine image quality.

Configure simple system data by setting entrance pupil diameter and float by step size, define a single zero-degree field with green wavelength, and keep environment, polarization, and material catalog basic.

Use the Zemax field data editor to add multiple field points, set angles and labels, and apply pickups for automatic field scaling, then view results in 3D and cross sections.

Learn how to set the field type in Zemax by angle, object height, paraxial image height, or real image height, with emphasis on angle for most use cases.

Use the Zemax field wizard to create uniform and equal-area fields in y and x, build grid and radial patterns, and manage fields with overwrite, delete, and multi-arm options.

Discover meridional rays and meridional planes in a Cooke triplet, using the optical axis and object points, with y fan visualization and Earth’s meridians analogy.

Explore meridional rays in Zemax by configuring field points, drawing rays from surfaces, considering infinity objects, and visualizing rays by wavelength across multiple fields.

Explore sagittal rays and meridional rays and their perpendicular relationship to understand how astigmatism arises when sagittal and meridional focuses differ.

Identify skew rays as rays from an object point that do not lie in the meridional plane containing the optical axis; they contrast with meridional rays.

Learn about axial rays, rays that start at a point on the axis and travel to another axis point, and how to trace and visualize them in Zmax.

Switch the field to ring to view axial rays, adjust the stop using paraxial ray aiming to resolve edge blocking from pupil aberration, and observe axial rings in Zemax.

Trace marginal rays from the optical axis to the stop edge to see how stop position and size set the maximum acceptance angle theta m and the marginal focus.

Explore chief rays, or key phrase, defined as rays from the edge of field that pass through the center of the aperture stop to image edge, independent of stop size.

Explore how Zemax reveals marginal and chief rays by inspecting the stop, center, and edge of the image field, with chief ray tied to maximum field and imaging center.

Explore the aperture stop as a limiting opening that changes the light bundle and optical power in a double Gauss system, while the field of view remains unchanged.

Relate mechanical datum targets and datum a, b, and c to the optical clear aperture, showing how measuring a few points with a CMM stylus defines tolerance and pass/fail decisions.

Explore the role of clear aperture in rhomboid optics, illustrating total internal reflection, surface scratches, and how clear apertures guide measurement and communication with glass shops.

Understand optical clear aperture as the region used for wavefront measurements (lambda/20), independent of lens's physical size. For example, a 6 mm diameter lens has a 5.4 mm clear aperture.

Build a simple Zemax camera using three lenses, two identical outer plano-convex lenses and a middle biconcave lens, to explore the clear aperture and entrance pupil concepts.

Configure a Zemax camera example: set aperture to 25 and 550 nm. Insert surfaces, select BK7 and NBK7 glasses, designate stop, and add a dummy surface with marginal ray height.

Explore how the clear semi diameter defines the clear aperture and how a 10% margin expands usable lens size while the stop remains unchanged.

Add three fields to the lens via field data editor; set max field to ten and aperture to 10%, then apply pickup with a 0.7 scale from field number two.

Use ray aiming to fix pupil aberration by aligning marginal rays with the edge of the aperture stop, improving vignetting at the cost of slower computation.

Explore how changing the stop in Zemax alters the optical system, automatically adjusting surface clear apertures to pass light through all lenses, with cautions for optical engineers.

Change the clear aperture of lenses to match real-world Thorlabs optics, explore placing a 12.5 mm clear semi-diameter, and analyze how vignetting limits ray transmission beyond the stop.

Adjust the entrance pupil diameter to reduce vignetting and ensure all rays pass through the optical system; initially estimate by eye, then explore automatic methods to minimize vignetting in Zemax.

Identify entrance pupil as the image of the aperture stop seen from object space. Moving the stop changes its location and the real or virtual image through lens group.

Define the exit pupil as the image of the aperture stop seen from the image space, which can reside anywhere—from inside the system to outside or between lenses.

Explore how to locate the entrance and exit pupils in Zemax, measure their diameters and distances from first and imaging surfaces, and perform pupil matching between telescope and eye.

Describe traveling rays from multiple object points, with Canada as the object and the USA as the entrance pupil, using normalized coordinates h_x h_y and p_x p_y.

Learn ray coordinates in Zemax imaging by tracing axial, marginal, chief rays from object through entrance pupil to image plane using h x h y and p x p y.

Navigate optical and mechanical specifications for imaging systems. Grasp focal length, back focal length, numerical aperture, field of view, f-number, working distance, magnification, distortion, resolution, and depth of field.

Discover the optical specifications: field and entrance pupil, and learn how effective focal length, angular field of view, format size, f-number, and numerical aperture guide lens design for imaging systems.

Explore effective focal length concepts by examining how optical centers, marginal rays, and collimated light define focal length in single and multi-element systems, including telephoto designs.

Explore field of view (FOV) and how x and y angles define what a lens sees, from wide to telephoto, using the chief ray and h equals f tan theta.

Define the f-number as focal length over entrance pupil diameter, indicating how much light a lens collects. Learn to image the stop to determine the entrance pupil for infinity-object cases.

Learn how to compute the f-number and entrance pupil diameter for a 50 mm lens, and how higher f-numbers reduce the aperture.

Explore how the speed of a lens affects image brightness and exposure time. See how changing the entrance pupil diameter and f-number makes the camera fast or slow.

Explore how image space f-number in Zemax determines the entrance pupil diameter, with automatic calculations for beams from infinity, and adjust soft stop size and object space numerical aperture.

Numerical aperture is a dimensionless measure n sin theta that describes light gathering and resolution in any optical system, and relates to entrance pupil diameter by NA ≈ D/(2f).

Explore the working f-number, where for objects not at infinity magnification m adjusts the f-number by multiplying it with 1 plus m, a concept used in microscopes.