ColliMeter™

For over 30 years, Optikos has manufactured, aligned, and installed refractive and reflective collimators with our definitive lens and camera measurements systems. Our quest to generate the best possible wavefronts on equipment ranging from our standard OpTest® systems to missile seeker test stations, and from our compact Meridian® target projectors to the tracking telescopes at Cape Canaveral has led to the development of sophisticated alignment apparatus and techniques. Until recently, this equipment was reserved for internal use but in response to numerous customer requests we are now pleased to offer this instrumentation for sale under our ColliMeter™ family brand. From the visible to the LWIR, and from small to large aperture systems, customers are now able to set the collimation of a source object, or to determine the apparent distance of a projected object.

The ColliMeter™ family employs a scanning pentaprism technique referenced in ISO 11421 to measure the wavefront slope across an aperture. Sub-aperture centroids are recorded as a function of pupil location, essentially producing a classical ray fan plot. A perfect collimator produces a straight line with slope related to the departure of the apparent object distance from infinity. For a real-world refractive collimator with a polychromatic light source, the plot conforms to higher order aberrations and statistical analysis is used to determine defocus.

Besides measuring collimation and defocus, the ColliMeter™ 350 can be fitted with an optional autocollimator module for coalignment of the source object to reference features on the collimating optic.

Two ColliMeter™ instruments are offered: The ColliMeter™ 350 for larger collimators in which the beam is horizontal and the instrument is brought to the collimating system, and the benchtop ColliMeter™ 50 in which smaller projectors are mounted vertically on the instrument.