Checking my own Ronchi test code…

June 8, 2015 | Telescopes | By: Mark VandeWettering

It was a long time since I wrote the code that I used for Ronchi code, and while I had some confidence in it, I wasn’t 100% sure that I had verified it. So, today, I took a copy of Ronchi for Windows 2 (I downloaded it from here) and set it up to predict the patterns for a 100 LPI screen and the 126″ radius of curvature that my current 12.5 mirror would have. I had it generate the patterns at six different offsets. Here’s the result:

ronchi for windows

I then took the same measurements and offsets, and added them to my own program and generated the similar array. Here are my results:

mytest

They look pretty much dead on. I can feel pretty confident about using my own code.

Addendum: This used to be more important to me, because I often didn’t have a Windows machine to run programs like Ronchi For Windows. In fact, I don’t have a box that runs Windows now. To write this article, I did confirm that using the Wine compatibility layer to run it on my Linux box, without the hassle of using a virtual machine or some such. Nifty.