Initial Prototyping - Final Lens

After a busy working week in the UK, here is the final result: my first ever lens. Crude: yes. Perfect: no. Informative: I certainly hope so. This prototype body and optics was never meant to be pretty or really usable at all, it was designed purely to answer some fundamental questions about lens design. Let's go back to my aims for the week and see what I've achieved:

• Prove that I have understood the basics so far, well enough to be able to make a working simple lens.
  Yes. The more I learn, the more I know I need to learn more to get this right, but so far the basics are nailed. Designing simple lenses is easily achievable.

• Prove that acrylic can be used as a possible lens element material, and that it can be easily manufactured with modest equipment.
  Yes. As yet, I don't know what performance restrictions I have with PMMA, but atleast for development it is a more than suitable glass substitute. As for manufacturing, I made 2 working lenses in a week within a school. Given a small CNC lathe and a buffing wheel, any lens could feasibly be made.
  
• Create a lens body and mount so the elements can be tested on a DSLR.
  Done. The photos show the mount and one of my optics loaded into it. It's not perfect, the push pull focus wobbles and isn't buttery smooth, but that's to be expected. This is a development lens. There's no need for a crazy time consuming to design and made lens mount, what I've made does the job and even better allows for future optical elements to be swapped in and out for testing.
  
• Test the performance of my first lens design, which features no optimization or correction.
  This is the next step. Testing will inform me of what is and isn't possible within the material and design criteria. It's a learning process and I am right at the start; testing these optics should help me understand how more complicated designs work and how they could be designed. Maybe after a couple months of reading and testing I might find myself with new designs to run off at school and further my research. Multi-element designs are the next step, but that's a long way off yet.
  
• Investigate and create a new optimized lens design using aspherical surfaces to correct image errors.
  I have made a plano-convex aspherical singlet. I'm writing this post retrospectively so I can already tell you that testing this lens has opened up a huge area of research. Image error correction will probably be the main focus of my coming posts and ASPH lens designs are likely to feature regularly.

Overall it's been a success. This was effectively the hard part due to the time constraints; now I have to look forward to testing, processing results, figuring out whats wrong and where to go next. There is a huge amount to learn from the two optics I have made, and I have a lot of time in France to use, test, and think. Stay tuned for results from the lenses!