From Struan:
There is a halfway house between using Oslo and guessing.
.. and in some cases no Oslo nor any guess are required to figure out the diameter of the entance pupil, for example like on fig.13 here ...
http://www.galerie-photo.com/pupille...que.html#fig13
.. when the iris is located in front of the glass like in Wollaston's meniscus and in a good ol' convertible view camera lens with the front group removed.
But our reader wants no iris at all, so this remark is irrelevant, unfortunately.
Regarding the determination of the pupils in a barrel lens with no iris, I remember a lecture I attended a long time ago, and the process was tought to us as follows, very close to what Struan said.
You start by finding the exit pupil by looking backward from the focal point, finding among all images of lens element mounts seen from behind the compound lens, which one appears to be the smallest in terms of apparent angle and not in terms of actual size of the image.
The image of all lens mounts which appears to have the smallest angle as seen from the focal point is the exit pupil.
The entrance pupil is then the image of this lens mount as seen from the front of the lens.
My guess, but I'm not 100% sure, is that it is equivalent to look at all images of lens mounts seen through all glasses from a point of view located on the optical axis, far away ahead of the lens, in front, and selecting the image which looks the smallest in terms of angular size.
So this is exactly what Struan said, with the additional condition that the point of view should be far away and that the size is the angular size of aperture images seen from this point of view.
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