popular science

34 POPULAR SCIENCE photograph by Christie Hemm Klok

Obsessed with sharpening his view, Marchis concen-

trated on developing adaptive optics—telescope sensors and

mirrors that contort to make up for atmospheric turbulence

that otherwise blurs images. With these systems, Marchis

captured ever clearer pictures of comets, Uranus, and Nep-

tune. In 2005, he was thefirst to discover an asteroid with

two tiny moons. He also helped develop the Gemini Planet

Imager, an instrument that debuted in 2014. It blocks dif-

fracted starlight from obscuring the target object and then

uses spectroscopy to measure its telling features.

Recently, Marchis joined Project Blue, a collaborative

effort to snap images of planets in the habitable zones of

Alpha Centauri, the star system closest to the sun. “We are

kind of like the cartographers of the 18th century,” he says.

But for space. The undertaking relies on private funding, so

Marchis went to the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show to learn

how other people pitch. There he came across a telescope cre-

ated by two physicists and an engineer. It was an early design

of an instrument called the eVscope. They hoped, once per-

fected, it would reveal the skies to amateurs in the kind of

colour and detail typically reserved for professionals.

Marchis ended up joining the venture as chief scientific

officer. The team had already engineered

the eVscope’s sight, but the system

needed refining, and its auto-pointing

abilities needed work. “We are a small

startup, meaning that our work is not

compartmentalised and sometimes is

outside the scope of our main skills,”

Marchis says. Today, with Marchis’ help,

the telescope uses GPS and a map of ce-

lestial objects to figure out where it is cur-

rently pointed, then can aim somewhere

else autonomously.

Just tell it you want to look at, say, the

Orion Nebula. Viewing it through a typi-

cal backyard scope, you’d see the nebula

as a black-and-white patch of dots and

smudges. That’s because when we gaze

up at a dim figure in the dark sky, our eyes

don’t receive enough photons to activate

our colour vision. The eVscope, though,

can collect light over time. If you look

at the nebula for 10 seconds, you’ll see a

smaller-scale colour version of what those

mountaintop Chilean telescopes show.

While the eVscope will compete with

similar instruments when it ships in

early 2019, Marchis leveraged his astro

bona fides to help connect his product

to the scientific community. SETI re-

searchers can alert eVscope owners to

here-now-gone-later cosmic events such

as comets or supernovae, and users can

choose to let the telescope’s software

transmit their view of the phenomenon

straight to SETI.

Marchis has been testing eVscope

prototypes with nonprofessionals on Bay

Area streets and at star parties. “Seeing

colour in a nebula from a garden in San

Francisco?” he says. “That’s pretty cool.”

Looking

Sharp

WHEN SETI RESEARCHER FRANCK

Marchis was a kid in France, he

looked at Saturn for the first time

through a telescope and saw the

planet magnified from a speck in

the night sky to a beautifully ringed orb.There’s

a whole universe out there, he thought. Which, of

course, he already knew, but it’s diferent to feel it.

Young Marchis’ studies soon sent him to Chile,

where telescopes sit high in the world’s most arid

desert, the better to capture every last photon. In

1996, he trained one of those telescope on Io, a

moon of Jupiter, and caught something no one had

ever witnessed from the ground: an active volcano,

in the process of erupting.

IN PROFILE  FRANCK MARCHIS

MARCHIS HAS

SPENT HIS

CAREER

GETTING CLEAR

PICTURES OF

COMETS,

URANUS, AND

NEPTUNE. STILL,

HE SAYS,

“SEEING COLOR

IN A NEBULA

FROM A GARDEN

IN SAN

FRANCISCO?

THAT’S PRETTY

COOL.

Insight

by SARAH SCOLES