LENS ABERRATION

In optics, the deviation from perfection is called aberration, and hence an image
formed by a lens with aberration is blurred or distorted, with the nature of the distortion
depending on the type of aberration.

Aberrations arise for one of two basic reasons:

 Chromatic aberrations - the material effect produced by the refraction of
different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation through slightly different
angles, resulting in a failure to focus. It causes colored fringes in the images
produced by uncorrected lenses. Images with noticeable chromatic aberration
are typified by edge details with noticeable colored halos.
There are 2 types of chromatic aberration:
 Axial/ longitudinal chromatic aberration - There is LONGITUDINAL
CHROMATIC ABERRATION, if a lens cannot focus different colors in the
same focal plane. It is caused by straight incident light. The foci of the
different colors lie at different points in the longitudinal direction along
the optical axis. The longitidinal chromatic aberration leads to colored
areas in the images, that arise, because not all three colors can be
displayed in focus.

 Lateral/ transverse chromatic aberration - Obliquely incident light

leads to LATERAL CHROMATIC ABERRATION. In that case all
colors are in focus in the same plane, but the foci are not placed
along the optical axis. This kind of aberration does not lead to
colored areas, but to fringes that occur around objects of high
contrast as the magnification is dependent on the wavelength.
A way to correct the chromatic aberration is to use
different lenses in one optical sytem. Different types of glasses
refract light in different intensities, so if you combine differing
glaastypes, you can reduce aberrations. An example is an
achromat, an optical system that combines a refracting and a
dispersing lens. The convex lens refracts the beams of short
wavelenghts (blue) stronger than those of long wavelenghts
(red) and the concave lens, that comes afterwards, does the
opposit: it spreads the red beams stronger than the blue ones.
It comes to a compensation of the focus difference and the
different light beams meet in one focus
 Geometric aberrations are caused by geometry (the shape of the lens or
mirror). They are sometimes called monochromatic aberrations because they
occur even for images formed with light of a single frequency. Images with
noticeable geometric aberration are typified by poor focus (the image looks
fuzzy) or distortion (the image turns straight lines into curves).
The most common monochrome aberrations are:
 Defocus - In optics, defocus is the aberration in which an
image is simply out of focus. This aberration is familiar to
anyone who has used a camera, videocamera, microscope,
telescope, or binoculars. In general, defocus reduces the
sharpness and contrast of the image. Fine detail in the
scene is blurred or even becomes invisible. Nearly all
image-forming optical devices incorporate some form of
focus adjustment to minimize defocus and maximize image
quality.
 Spherical aberration
 Coma
 Astigmatism
 Field curvature
 Image distortion