Variation of astigmatism with accommodation and its relationship with dark focus

The refraction of 122 eyes was measured for five distances of fixation with an objective Canon Auto Refractor. The cylindrical component was found to vary, but by a small amount. We found no evidence of a deliberate reduction in astigmatism with accommodation, in accord with other studies. The axis was also found to vary by at least 5 degrees in about half of the subjects tested, which is also in good accord with other investigations. The dark focus of 31 eyes was not found to correlate with a minimum astigmatic distance, since this only occurred in 11 out of the 31 eyes. For these 11 eyes, the correlation of dark focus and the dioptric distance where astigmatism was minimum was equal to + 0.54. It implied that for those eyes (about one-third of all types) there was a tendency to yield the best optical quality at the dark focus.