Polychromatic Optical Image. Diffraction Limited System and Influence of the Longitudinal Chromatic Aberration

The illuminance and the chromaticity distributions in the polychromatic diffraction pattern of an object point, formed by an optical system, are computed and discussed in this paper. We consider the aberration-free system, and systems with the most frequent states of longitudinal chromatic aberrations, i.e. apochromatism, achromatism and systems with lineal residual chromatic aberration. The study is carried out by determining in each case the colour (illuminance and chromaticity) in different image planes. The colour distributions in the diffraction patterns give more information about the aberration corrections than the study of only the illuminance distributions. The influence of the spectral emission is also studied by using the standard sources EQ (equal energy), A, B and C (1931 CIE). The standard observer (CIE 1931) is taken as the receiver.