A Semiautomatic Method for Interpreting Shearing Interferograms

Abstract

We describe a system for testing mirrors and lenses which uses a lateral shearing interferometer and laser light source, and in which data are recorded and processed digitally to obtain a description of the test wavefront in terms of a polynomial function, from which the shape of the test mirror may be computed. Precision of the system is about 0.1lambda. It represents a step in the development of a completely automatic testing procedure.