The optical design for Cryoscope: a wide-field NIR telescope with low thermal emission

Year: 2022 DOI: 10.1117/12.2630557
We present the optical design for Cryoscope, a 0.26 m aperture telescope that is a f/2 objective operating over the photometric K band (1.99 to 2.55 μm) with diffraction limited imaging. It has a 16 deg² FoV with a 7.1′′/pix plate scale on a 2048×2048 18 μm/pixel Teledyne H2RG detector array. The objective is a catadioptric design incorporating two thin fused silica meniscus lenses near the entrance aperture, a spherical primary mirror, and a doublet immediately in front of the detector to flatten the image surface. The design solution is capable of delivering diffraction limited images over a 10° field diameter at f/1.25 in the NIR. The use of fused silica for the first two lens elements allows the design to be used for a broad range of applications from the vacuum ultraviolet to thermal IR with only re-optimization of the field flattening doublet. In the VUV (185 to 300 nm) the design is no longer diffraction limited, but can still be made to be pixel limited with detector arrays having pixels as small as 10 μm. The design provides a compact, wide field, and fast objective that can scale to a 1 m-class telescope and offers several benefits over a classical Schmidt telescope. The convex fused silica meniscus lens is strong enough to serve as a vacuum window allowing the entire optical path to be cryogenically cooled to maintain low thermal emission while delivering two orders of magnitude larger field of view than previous ground-based designs for the thermal infrared.