What an optical designer can do for you after you get the design

Once the optical design for a spectrograph is finalized, a number of tasks remain for the optical designer which largely simplify the engineering, fabrication, and assembly of the instrument. Such tasks include sensitivity analysis for alignment tolerances, flexure tolerances and flexure compensation, distributions of radiation incidence angles for coating design, and thermal analysis for thermal compensation. For the Keck ESI instrument, the entire spectrograph and guiding system optical designs were directly translated into a 3-dimensional AutoCADr file, complete with clear apertures, actual traced rays, beam envelopes, stray light, and footprints of the beam paths at the optical surfaces. The mechanical engineers could then design the spectrograph structure in 3-dimensions around the existing optical layout.© (1998) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.