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 scientificofficer. 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 inthe 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 MARCHISMARCHIS 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