Design and analysis of the four-mirror optical system

Based on the methods to design the three-mirror reflective system, the aberrations formulae for the four-mirror optical reflection system have been deduced and presented for the first time. The diversity of parameter ranges for the designed system for different structures is also studied to select the parameters to obtain the practicable initial structure. Example designs with proposed methods are presented here and their performance evaluations demonstrate that the image qualities of these examples attain the diffraction limits.