EVOLUTION of the ASTRONOMICAL EYEPIECE
ORTHOSCOPIC EYEPIECES:
The quest for distortionless imaging
characteristics of photographic objec-
tives in the 1850’s and 1860’s led C.A.
Steinheil to design the Periscop lens in
1865. Prior to this in 1859 the Petzval
Orthoskop appeared. The fundamental
property of any orthopscopic lens is
that it should have a wide flat field free
from rectilinear distortion and angular
magnification distortion.
In 1880 Ernst Abbé brought out an
Ortho scopic eyepiece for Zeiss. The
field lens is an overcorrected triplet
combination with a negative compo-
nent in the middle, followed by a simple
plano-convex eye lens, convex surface
almost in contact. This eyepiece is
remarkable for great eye clearance and
has given rise to a whole family of eye-
pieces, some of them of very complex
form. In Abbé’s design hard crown and
dense flint glasses were used to secure
an apparent field of 30˚, and an eye
clearance of 0.8Fe. The Zeiss
Orthoscopic patented in 1930 made
use of less usual glasses; barium
crown, extra-dense flint an d borate
flint. This increased the apparent field
26
to 40˚ at f/5. In the mid-1930’s Barr
and Stroud patented an orthoscopic
eyepiece in which the simple eye lens is
bi-convex, with the steeper convex sur-
face remote from the eye having a par-
abolic figure. This widened the distor-
tion free field to 64˚ and the eye clear-
ance was extended to 0.91Fe. Th e
glasses used were boro-silicate crown
and extra-dense flint.
Another aspheric variant was designed
for Zeiss, probably by Robert Richter in
1934.
A c c o rding to th e British paten t, the
t h i rd surface (a steeply con ve x face
of an over- c o r rect ed eye triplet) was
p arabolized and pro vided a wide-
an gle eyepiece with a 53˚ field in
w hich distortion was eliminated; the
lateral colour removed witho ut use
bein g made of mo re than o ne lens of
flint glass; ast igmatism reduced t o
t hat resulting from the Pe tzval cur-
v a t u re, and spherical aberration o f
the exit pupil eliminat ed or marg i n-
ally reve rsed. Eye c learance was
reduced sligh tly to 0.66Fe.