PyRFTL: an open source Python tool for custom tube lens generation from off-the-shelf optics

Optical design from stock optics can greatly reduce time and cost compared to custom components. The development of remote refocusing and oblique plane microscopy creates a need to build custom microscope tube lenses with specific focal lengths that are not commercially available. Previous methods required proprietary software licenses to take optical aberrations into account. In order to allow a wider community to quickly design custom tube lenses, an open-source, Python-based software for tube lens design is presented in this Letter. It creates tube lenses from the combination of two commercial lenses and then selects the best ones given their optical performances.