[Raytrace] Hi everybody

[Peter Chen]

Hi folks:

	 Just signed up on this list to see what is going on.  Apparently not much 
activity as yet.   So I thought I'd introduce myself and my area of interest.

	I work on the development of lightweight mirrors.   The details are in a 
web site which unfortunately is not publicly accessible at the moment due 
to NASA concerns about security.   The web site is in the process of being 
relocated to another address where the world can access it.

	 My interest is to design new telescopes around the lightweight 
mirrors.  Hence ray tracing.  I have done a fair amount of  work using 
Beam3, Beam4, and TDesign (Rutten and van Venrooij).   I have played around 
with OSLO LT,  I also have a copy of the latest MODAS and Zemax 10.0.   I'm 
still learning to use those.

	Most of the mirrors we have produced so far are spherical, although we 
just made our first parabola a short while ago.   My current interest is 
therefore to check out existing published designs of spherical mirror 
telescopes (mostly from S&T) and see which ones are the most cost-effective 
to build.  By cost-effective I mean the least number of optical components 
(lenses, secondary and tertiary mirrors, etc), components that are easy to 
make, and where the tolerancing is not too exact.  Not having had any 
formal education in optical design, I'm sort of feeling my way around.

	I look forward to hearing what other members of this group are engaged in.

Regards,
P.C. Chen