The dimension and configuration of aerial cameras is mainly determined by the optical system. A miniaturization design was made based on the requirement of a 25× aerial zoom lens. In order to decrease total optical length, a design scheme was employed by selecting mechanically compensated zoom lens with a negative compensator, shortening the focus length of variator and compensator, and increasing the distance between front group and variator. An initial configuration was obtained by solving equations of aberrations. According to aberration theory, the aberrations were corrected by using ZEMAX optical design software. The result indicates that the focusing length can vary from 20mm to 500 mm continuously for this system, the optical total length is only 198 mm, and the Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) values are higher than 0.4 at 0 field and 0.2 at 0.7 field respectively.