New Technique of Segments Alignment in a Large Dimensions Mirror

The tendency in the manufacture of large telescopes that working in visible light, has improve the manufacture of large mirrors by the use off-axissegments, which must be aligned with very high precision in order of fractions of wavelength for the optimal operation. In this paper we present a new method for alignmentsegments of a big telescope, where the positions of the images produced by each off-axis segment, of a point source placed at center of curvature, the primary mirror. These positions can be known by exact rays tracing, considering the aberrations produce in each off-axis segment. Consequently, each point source is not on the optical axis of the system. Some numerical simulations are shown to establish the accuracy achieved with the proposed method.