A lens with spherical surfaces (i.e. surfaces that are a segment of a sphere) does not focus all parallel light rays onto a single point. Instead, there is a focal surface called a caustic. This causes spherical aberration. As long as the lens curvature is small(R small), i.e. the ray is near to the optical axis (paraxial rays), the aberration is small and we approximate the caustic by a single point. However, If R is large, the aberration is significant and the rays come to a focus at a different point.
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