Baffle design and test for wide-field off-axis telescopes

An off-axis telescope has several advantages in optical performance comparing with a conventional on-axis telescope. However, in general, an off-axis telescope has a narrow field of view due to the linear astigmatism caused by the asymmetric structure. It was shown in the previous work that the linear astigmatism can be eliminated by properly configuring parameters in a confocal off-axis reflector system. Furthermore, the third order aberrations of a confocal off-axis telescope can be minimized by optimizing the shape of the mirrors. Despite many advantages, the confocal off-axis telescopes have been evaded because of difficulties of off-axis mirror fabrication, alignment process and unaccustomed off-axis baffle design. The baffle for the off-axis telescope should be designed considering that the effects of stray lights are different because of the asymmetry of off-axis system. In this poster, the design, manufacturing, and test for the baffle and housing of an off-axis telescope are presented.