mark@sickkids.UUCP (Mark Bartelt) (07/26/89)
A researcher here has been doing some optical design work, and is
looking for software to make his life easier. He knows about one
package called MacSIGMA, sold by a company in England named Kidger
Optics. Unfortunately, it is frightfully expensive (many thousands
of dollars), and his research budget precludes paying that much for
what he wants to do. He's hoping that there may be something else
available that, while perhaps not as complete as the Kidger software,
would nonetheless be adequate for his needs and cost considerably
less. If anyone has any pointers to a free (or nearly free) public
domain optics package, or an alternative commercial product available
for a reasonable amount of money, I'd appreciate hearing about it via
e-mail. Mac packages would be preferred, but, lacking that, software
running under UNIX or even IBM PCs would be OK. Thanks in advance.
For the record, MacSIGMA is described as including "Ray Tracing,
3-Color Geometric MTF, Diffraction MTF, Aberration Curves, Third
Order Aberrations, Surface insertion and removal, Angle solves,
Lens scaling, Interactive setting up of new systems, Default ray
patterns and default weights for optimization, Glass catalog, ..."
I don't even pretend to know what most of that stuff means, but
presumably it's more or less the sort of stuff the guy is looking
for (or, more likely, it's actually a superset of what he really
needs).
---------------
Mark Bartelt UUCP: {utzoo,decvax}!sickkids!mark
Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto BITNET: mark@sickkids.utoronto
416/598-6442 INTERNET: mark@sickkids.toronto.edu