Lens Design Fundamentals, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5

Chromatic Aberration

5.1 INTRODUCTION

In 1661, Huygens created the two-lens compound negative eyepiece which generally corrected lateral color, that is, yielding an image of a white object which subtends the same angle for all colors (see Chapter 16). This was a remarkable achievement and won him acclaim at the scientific conferences, since other eyepieces of the day yielded poor performance and contained often 5, 8, and even 19 lenses. An interesting point is that Huygens had no concept of achromatizing his eyepieces or any other kind of optical system for that matter; nevertheless, it worked better than other eyepieces of the day. The reason for Huygens' lack of understanding was that no one understood the dispersive properties of glass. ...