Xu Renfeng, Thibos Larry N, Lopez-Gil Norberto, Kollbaum Pete, Bradley Arthur
J Opt Soc Am A Opt Image Sci Vis. 2019 Apr 1;36(4):B97-B102. doi: 10.1364/JOSAA.36.000B97.
Starbursts seen around small bright lights at night have been attributed to optical scatter, diffraction, or aberrations. We manipulated pupil aperture and aberrations to investigate the entopic appearance of perceived starbursts. The impact of circular, annular, and wedge-shaped pupil apertures, and spherical aberration sign and magnitude were used to identify pupil sub-apertures responsible for each radial perceived starburst line. Local intensity distributions within the starbursts mapped onto unique sub-regions of the pupil of both phakic and pseudophakic eyes, consistent with the hypothesis that ocular aberrations are the cause of starbursts. In paraxially focused eyes, the size of starbursts is predicted by the amount of spherical aberration, and starburst orientation is either the same or 180 deg rotated from the pupil region that creates each starburst line. No starbursts are seen when the pupil diameter is smaller than 3 mm. Replacing the eye's natural lens with a radially symmetric and optically homogeneous intraocular lens reduced the observed number of starbursts by 50%. Geometrical optics modeling including the measured aberrations of an individual eye can reveal point spread function structure that captures some of the key elements of the entopic perceptions.
夜间在小亮点周围看到的星芒现象被归因于光学散射、衍射或像差。我们通过控制瞳孔孔径和像差来研究感知到的星芒的内视现象。利用圆形、环形和楔形瞳孔孔径以及球差的符号和大小来确定对每条径向感知到的星芒线负责的瞳孔子孔径。星芒内的局部强度分布映射到有晶状体眼和人工晶状体眼瞳孔的独特子区域，这与眼像差是星芒产生原因的假设一致。在近轴聚焦的眼睛中，星芒的大小由球差量预测，并且星芒方向与产生每条星芒线的瞳孔区域相同或旋转180度。当瞳孔直径小于3毫米时看不到星芒。用径向对称且光学均匀的人工晶状体替换眼睛的自然晶状体可使观察到的星芒数量减少50%。包括个体眼睛测量像差的几何光学建模可以揭示点扩散函数结构，该结构捕捉了内视感知的一些关键要素。
