  Experiments in nuclear and particle physics often use magnetic fields to
guide charged reaction products to a detector. Due to their gyration in the
guide field, the particles hit the detector within an area that can be
considerably larger than the diameter of the source where the particles are
produced. This blurring of the image of the particle source on the detector
surface is described by a suitable point spread function (PSF), which is
defined as the image of a point source. We derive simple analytical expressions
for such magnetic PSFs, valid for any angular distribution of the emitted
particles that can be developed in Legendre polynomials. We investigate this
rather general problem in the context of neutron beta decay spectrometers and
study the effect of limited detector size on measured neutron decay correlation
parameters. To our surprise, insufficient detector size does not affect much
the accuracy of such measurements, even for rather large radii of gyration.
This finding can considerably simplify the layout of the respective
spectrometers.
