Reflecting inside a Spherical Mirror and a Catacaustic

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This Demonstration shows an image formed inside a spherical mirror of radius and center
on the optical axis
. Let the point
be off
and let
be the orthogonal projection of
onto
. After reflection, the reflection of the ray parallel to
from
meets the ray
at the point
. The notion of image of a point is not uniquely defined because the reflections of three rays from a given point do not meet in a single point. The image of the directed segment
is a vertical segment with endpoint
as
. If you increase the height
of
,
moves to the right.
Contributed by: Izidor Hafner (January 2019)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
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