The star sensor is used to detect the position of the stars in space. By recognizing and analyzing star maps, satellites or spacecraft can automatically change the direction of movements to realize the navigation function. However, the strong background radiation in the sky during the day results in a low contrast of the star image. This brings great difficulties to star sensors that work on atmospheric platforms observing stars all the time. To overcome the adverse impacts of the stray lights from the sky during the whole day through the atmosphere, a catadioptric all-day star sensor optical system is presented. In comparison to Cassegrain System, the design has a smaller size of aperture of housing. Therefore, it has the advantage of superb suppression of the stray lights caused by external sky background radiation and other factors. By adopting a plane mirror to compress the light path, the size of the system is decreased, realizing a light and miniaturized design. Based on the analysis of the characteristics of sky background radiation and star radiation, the optical system parameters are selected. The system has a focal length of 800mm, an effective aperture of 70mm, and an instantaneous field of view of 2 °. Meanwhile, with a steering mirror, it can observe an area between 40° and 70° airspace at all day. Finally, the results of the analysis show that the optical system spot shape approaches to a circle in the wide spectrum of 800 nm ∼ 1700 nm, and the energy of which is close to the Gaussian distribution and highly concentrated. The modulation transfer function curve is close to the diffraction limit with small chromatic aberration of magnification. © 2019 COPYRIGHT SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.