This study established a LabVIEW-based virtual instrument system to measure optical activity through the communication of conventional optical instrument with computer via RS232 port. This system realized the functions for automatic acquisition, real-time display, data processing, results playback, and so forth. Therefore, it improved accuracy of the measurement results by avoiding the artifici...

Sixty years ago, August Sonnefeld of Zeiss reported on observations with experimental telescopes. The goal of his investigation was to determine the ideal amount of distortion applied to optical instruments that are used in combination with the human eye. His studies were inconclusive and partially contradictory. We have picked up this problem once again, adopting a modern point of view about t...

The writings of Walter Benjamin include appropriations and transformations of modernist architectural history and theory that offer an opportunity to broaden the interpretation of how the relationship between the 'unconscious' and technologically aided 'optics' is figured in his commentaries on cultural modernity. This essay focuses on three moments in his writings, each of which touches on thi...

An optical instrument we refer to as the "biaxial orientation device" has been developed for finding the optical plane, acute bisectrix, and obtuse bisectrix in biaxial crystals by means of optically aligning conoscopically formed melatopes and measuring the angular coordinates of the melatopes, where the angular values allow for determination of the optical plane containing the optical axes us...

The optical behavior of gradient biaxial dielectrics has not been widely explored in the literature due to their complicated nature, but the extra degrees of freedom in the index tensor have the potential of yielding useful optical instruments which are otherwise unachievable. In this work, a design method is described in detail which allows one to combine the behavior of up to four totally ind...

The requirements concerning satellite optical instruments pointing stability are getting more and more stringent. To put up with a disturbed dynamic environment, the Line-of-Sight (LOS) control laws have to be efficient over a large bandwidth. One of the main performance limitation comes from the flexible modes of these optical payloads and their variations w.r.t host satellite configuration. T...

This paper analyzes the systematic errors in Hadamard transform optical instruments caused by moving masks, incorrect mask alignment, faulty mask fabrication, missing data, diffraction, etc. and describes techniques for reducing or eliminating these errors. In a great many cases the behavior of the instrument can be characterized by a single matrix equation of the form eta = TWa + e, where the ...

A number of functions for the autofocusing of microscopes and other optical instruments are to be found in the literature. In this article we compare 11 of them to determine, in an objective manner, which functions are most suitable for implementation with real-time video acquisition systems. Three different images, each representing a typical class of image, are used in the comparison. Among t...