Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- transitive verb To make parallel; line up.
- transitive verb To adjust the line of sight of (an optical device).
from The Century Dictionary.
- To bring into the same line, as the axes of two lenses or the telescope of an optical instrument; also, to make parallel, as the rays of light passing through a lens.
- To render the line passing through the optical center of the object-glass of a telescope and the middle wire of its reticule strictly perpendicular (or sometimes parallel) to the axis on which the telescope turns: usually by the aid of a collimator, or of star-observations in reversed positions of the instrument.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- transitive verb (Physics & Astron.) To render parallel to a certain line or direction; to bring into the same line, as the axes of telescopes, etc.; to render parallel, as rays of light.
- transitive verb an eyepiece with a diagonal reflector for illumination, used to determine the error of collimation in a transit instrument by observing the image of a cross wire reflected from mercury, and comparing its position in the field with that of the same wire seen directly.
- transitive verb (Optics) a lens used for producing parallel rays of light.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb To
focus into a narrowbeam or column.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- verb make or place parallel to something
- verb adjust the line of sight of (an optical instrument)
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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A slight vacuum is pulled behind an aluminized mylar plastic film to create a very large convex mirror to collimate the visual system in many aircraft simulators.
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In fact, if the particles in the jet are fast enough, they can collimate themselves quite nicely due to relativistic effects.
World-wide Campaign Sheds New Light on Nature's "LHC" | Universe Today 2010
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In 2005 they used high-power ‘Luxeon’ LEDs, i.e. non-coherent sources, combined with a large Fresnel lens to collimate the non-directional light emitted, and managed two-way audio communications over a distance of 160 km (100 miles!) between mountaintops in Tasmania.
Long-range optical communication… how much would you pay? « Skulls in the Stars 2008
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It was enough time to collimate a neutrino-beam and to fire it through the cases.
Fiction snippet: A Small Dose Of The Flu sbisson 2004
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We collimate it so that we have a uniform beam illuminating the test piece.
Archive 2004-04-01 John 2004
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Basically I seem to have designed a device which will collimate an extended light source.
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Using a light pipe [such as fiber optic] won't help to collimate your beam, total internal reflection means that as the angle of incidence = = the angle of reflection, the light entering the pipe at random angles will exit just as randomly.
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You can focus it to a point, but there's nothing you can do that will fully collimate the beam, i.e. it will always diverge.
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You're going to want to collimate it, which is a way of aligning the optics.
Astronomy Cast 2008
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There are two nouns morion kind of helmet, does not concern us here (it is probably from Spanish smoky quartz, has an interesting etymology: it is from a Latin word here about collimate, from an erroneous reading of Latin collineare; I wonder if there is a list somewhere of words with similar histories?
languagehat.com languagehat 2010
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