All-spherical catadioptric telescope design for wide-field imaging.

The current trend in building medium-size telescopes for wide-field imaging is to use a Ritchey-Chrétien (RC) design with a multilens corrector near the focus. Our goal is to find a cost-effective alternative design to the RC system for seeing-limited observations. We present an f/4.5 all-spherical catadioptric system with a 1.5° field of view. The system consists of a 0.8 m spherical primary and 0.4 m flat secondary mirror combined with a meniscus lens and followed by a three-lens field corrector. The optical performance is comparable to an equivalent f/4.5 RC system. We conclude that, for telescopes with apertures up to 2 m, the catadioptric design is a good alternative to the RC system.