Tracing Rays

By default, OpticStudio computes the paraxial and working F/# of a system using ray tracing. For details, see the definitions for "Paraxial working F/#" and "Working F/#".

For systems with very large F/#s, the ray tracing method may be inaccurate, because the very small angles between the marginal and chief rays leads to round-off error, and even small amounts of aberrations such as spherical aberration can significantly affect the calculation of F/#. For these reasons, OpticStudio will "cap" the maximum F/# to a value of 10,000. It is recommended that rays be used to compute the F/# for all systems whose F/# is less than 10,000.

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