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The eye's aplanatic answer

The human eye is a simple, but extremely robust, optical instrument. Analysis by sophisticated wavefront-sensing technology and customized ray-tracing has now revealed that the eye is actually an aplanatic design, with the cornea and lens compensating each other's aberrations.

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Figure 1: Modelling the eye.
Figure 2: Average aberration maps for myopic and hyperopic groups, for each ocular component: cornea, internal lens and total eye.
Figure 3: Three eye models with different shapes for the crystalline lens.

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Acknowledgements

Our work is supported in part by the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, Spain (grants FIS2004-2153 and FIS2007-64765) and Fundación Séneca, Murcia, Spain (04524/GERM/06). We thank the members of our laboratory for their contributions to some specific parts of the reviewed research.

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Correspondence to Pablo Artal.

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Artal, P., Tabernero, J. The eye's aplanatic answer. Nature Photon 2, 586–589 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2008.187

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