Optics of human eye: 400 years of exploration from Galileo's time

We present a brief historical background and a description of the main features of the eye's optical properties: the eye is a simple, but rather optimized, optical instrument. It is only since Galileo's time that the importance of the eye as a part of different optical instruments has driven a continuous scientific exploration of ocular optics. In the past decade, the use of wavefront sensing technology allowed us to complete our understating of eye optics as a robust aplanatic system. OCIS codes: 330.0330, 330.7327, 330.7326, 000.2850.