[Raytrace] Greetings from Mike

[Michael D. Crawford]

Hi,

I just joined this list after seeing the announcement on the ATM list.  I 
thought I might have something useful to contribute.

I have a long history of _attempting_ to raytrace, without a lot of success.  I 
used to use the procedures I found in Amateur Telescope Making, only with a hand 
calculator instead of trig tables and an adding machine.

Some of my earliest attempts at computer programming were trying to write 
raytracing programs in either FORTRAN or C.  I wasn't a good enough programmer 
back then to do it, but I am now - I've been programming as a career for over 14 
years.

I downloaded OSLO LT recently and plan to use it to study the design for my 8" 
ritchey-chretien, but haven't messed with it yet.

But I'm thinking, over a long period of time, of writing an optical design 
program that would be Free Software in the sense that the Free Software 
Foundation puts it - it would be licensed under the GNU General Public License, 
and so would come with source code.

I think it's great that OSLO LT is provided as freeware but I think it would be 
better if people had a powerful tool that they also possessed the source to, 
with the right to make and redistribute modifications.

So I don't want to just know how raytracing is done working with existing 
programs, I'm interested in understanding how these programs work internally, 
the algorithms and data structures used, what would be the requirements for a 
really useful tool and so on.

Also any program I would write would be cross-platform, probably using the 
ZooLib cross-platform application framework (http://zoolib.sourceforge.net/) so 
you could run it on any OS you like.

I have a web page about my telescope making at

http://www.geometricvisions.com/atm/

When I started college I majored in astronomy at CalTech.  I later changed my 
major to Physics and transferred to the University of California at Santa Cruz, 
where I successfully petitioned for credit in UCSC's optics course because of my 
experience making telescopes as a teenager.

Mike
-- 
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com

   Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.

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