Software application for designing and evaluating optical systems. The first release of this opus software application was created by greatly cleaning and simplifying the application the author had enhanced and extended over decades on an as-needed basis. This was done purposely to create a reasonably clean, simple, straightforward code base suitable for enhancement and extension by other programmers. Some capabilities were removed in this process - to be re-implemented more cleanly and efficiently.
Opus computes AKA "traces" the path of light "rays" from an "entrance-aperture" or "object-plane", through a series of "optical surfaces" (lens-surfaces, mirror-surfaces, vignette-stops) to a focal surface, where opus computes image error "aberrations" at several "field-angles" and colors AKA "wavelengths".
Opus executes command lines entered by keyboard or read from a "macro" file. These commands tell opus to change optical-system properties, compute the optical-system ray-trace, evaluate images & aberrations, and present general/design/aberration/image information as text (formatted columns of numbers and text) or as graphics (colorful spots, curves, lines and images drawn in on-screen windows).
