Description
Theoretical development and design of a compact nonmechanical multi-zoom telescope system is presented. A liquidcrystal spatial light modulator (LC SLM) enables selection of four seperate beam paths without the use of moving parts.Each path incurs a different focus aberration in the image plane that can be deconvolved with postprocessing to yieldfour possible corrected magnification options. To increase exibility, each region has a 40-wave subrange of focus. Opticalzooms of up to 10 times magnification are feasible and are limited only by system noise and signal to noise ratio.Elimination of moving parts for focus could prove beneficial for sysems in which weight, volume, and power consumptionhave stringent requirements. The presented design can be constructed using all commercial off-the-shelf parts.
