# What is a good book to self-teach optics? [duplicate]

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I'm interested in camera lenses and how things like barrel distortion and lens flare happens, but know that one cannot just start there. I'm a math major and I've worked out of Strauss PDE book so I know about the wave equation and some stuff beyond as well. Are there any good books out there for me to self-teach so I can at least begin to understand all this?

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## marked as duplicate by Qmechanic♦Dec 1 '18 at 7:09

• Lens flare is just internal reflections and one wouldn't go beyond ray optics and Fresnel equation for the modeling. If you want to simulate it, then you will either need an optical raytracing program or write the code yourself (there is the theoretical possibility of pen and paper, if you are really ambitious... it's "just" matrix-multiplications...). In general, photographic lenses are probably being designed without wave optics, since they are usually not operating close to the diffraction limit. – CuriousOne May 26 '16 at 0:01
• If simulating raytraced graphics is your goal, look into Blender computer graphics software with Yafaray ray tracing extensions. Both are free and there is a Blender StackExchange. – paisanco May 26 '16 at 0:28
• @CuriousOne Your last statement has certainly been true in the past, but I'm not sure it holds now. I'm not close to camera design, but I suspect that economics have shifted. The CCD chip is now a very expensive part of specialist cameras, so to get the most out of it means that you want the resolution of your optics to match the CCD cell sizes, i.e. pretty much the diffraction limit for typical camera lens dimensions. In the old days, there was no economic penalty of failing to approach the expensive-to-realize diffraction limit. But now the diffraction limit is much cheaper to approach. – WetSavannaAnimal May 26 '16 at 0:46
• @WetSavannaAnimalakaRodVance: Most consumer lenses are not good enough to exploit the resolution of CCDs in the latest cameras. A lens that is as good or better than the sensor can easily set you back 2-10 times the cost of the camera body and I would estimate that the glass that a serious amateur (let alone a professional) carries around these days is almost two orders of magnitude more expensive than the silicon in the camera. I wish you were right, but the stuff in my camera bag clearly doesn't meet that high a quality standard. – CuriousOne May 26 '16 at 1:01

As @CuriousOne says, both the effects you refer to are explicable with ray optics. But both are subtle insofar that you won't find easy expressions for them in any undergrad physics course: you actually have to do accurate numerical ray simulations to see that spherical lenses impose geometrical distortion (barrelling and so forth). Very roughly, geometric distortion arises simply because Snell's law is $n_j\,\sin\theta_j = const$ at interfaces instead of $n_j\,\theta_j = const$. The latter, approximate form would mean that a lens system would impose conformal, linear maps on the object plane. The higher order terms in the sine Taylor series mess up conformalhood and linearity more and more as the ray angles increase, i.e. the system deviates from the so called paraxial approximation more and more.
There are rules of thumb - not very accurate - that designers used to estimate geometric distortion in the old days before computer design. All of these rules of thumb are grounded on the Seidel distortion measure, which is the geometric distortion that arises from spherical surface lenses calculated by assuming that Snells law is $n_j (\theta_j - \frac{\theta_j^3}{3!}) = const$. The five Seidel aberrations, of which geometric distortion is one, are treated thoroughly in Chapter 5 "Geometrical Theory of Aberration" in: