SPIE, the somewhat bizarrely acronymed International Society for Optical Engineering, is a household name for astronomy instrumentalists. Organiser of the biggest global conference on telescopes and instruments, SPIE publish a number of decent journals and some very useful books. I’m a particular fan of their Field Guide series, which are small spiral-bound quick-reference booklets on topics like adaptive optics, spectroscopy or optical testing. I recently saw that SPIE have now released a free iPhone app for their Field Guide to Geometrical Optics
SPIE have released a number of iPhone apps. I tried their conference planner earlier this summer, at the San Diego Astronomical Telescopes conference. That was not a success due to the unfortunate timing of the iOS4 release just before the conference and the updated iOS4-compatible app being held up by the app store. That was bad luck, so I was keen to give them another go, and I’m glad I did.
The Field Guide goes through all the standard formulae for reflection, refraction, optical path length, magnification, etc, as well as aberrations and optical systems, and the information is presented very legibly in the app. There are some great added-value features too: some of the key equations are tappable, which allows you to perform the calculation described in the equation with values of choice, like so:
Key graphs can be viewed bigger, without surrounding text. There is a separate listing just for the equations, and you can also record notes.
I’m really impressed with this application, it looks nice and has some excellent features, and I think the Field Guides lend themselves really well to viewing a mobile device. Best of all, it’s also free! Get it in the app store here.
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