The Compensation of Instrumental Polarization by Inclined Mirrors

Abstract

The use of a second mirror to compensate for the polarization introduced by a mirror inclined at 45 0 to the incident beam is examined and the effect on this compensation of errors in construction and non-collimated beams is analysed. It is shown that the effects of construction errors and differences between the two mirrors easily outweigh those of non-collimated beams, at least for systems with numerical apertures characteristic of astronomical telescopes .