Abstract

Land and Snyder¹ and Jagger² resolved single photoreceptors through the natural optics of the American garter snake and cane toad, respectively, capitalizing on their large photoreceptors and good optics. It is widely thought that the optical quality of the human eye is too poor relative to the grain of the cone mosaic to resolve photoreceptors in the living human eye. Nonetheless, we show here that when the pupil is large and aberrations are carefully corrected, the cone mosaic can occasionally be seen through the eye's natural optics. In eyes for which the cone mosaic cannot be imaged directly, information about cone spacing can often be obtained from the power spectra of retinal images.

© 1995 Optical Society of America