A couple of weeks ago, Joe Bauman began a thread which discussed the topic of imaging extrasolar planets by blocking the star's light and collecting photons from the area surrounding the star. I was one of the skeptics of the technique. As it turns out, there's a fascinating article in the May edition of Scientific American. The article discusses a proposed new generation of enormous earthbound telescopes with apertures in the 100 meter range. A few paragraphs of the article address just the topic Joe was discussing. It theorized that a scope with a mere 80 meters of aperture should be able to study something on the order of 40 nearby stellar systems which are good candidates. The technique would occlude the star with a tiny blocking disk and then would perform spectroscopy on the region around it. Joe was talking about direct imaging, which this article didn't address directly. But a spectrum's good enough for me. So I'll stand down from my former position, since real scientists think it's a perfectly valid technique. All you need is just a little more scope. MC As far as direct imaging goes, it might take even more than 100 meters. The article estimated that a 100 meter scope could image Betelgeuse with about 3000 pixels (55 x 55). So even a honking giant planet might only eat up a pixel or two. So when the Kecks are retired because of their dinkiness, perhaps we could find some room at SPOC.