A bright future ahead for direct imaging of extrasolar planets

Olivier Guyon
Subaru Observatory & U. Arizona

Although direct imaging of exoplanets is starting to yield detections,
it is still extremely challenging, and most of our knowledge on
exoplanets is derived from non-imaging techniques. Direct imaging and
characterization (spectroscopy) of potentially habitable planets is of
very high scientific value but is still beyond the capabilities of
ground-based and space-based observatories currently in operation or
under construction. 

We should however see in the next decade considerable progress in
direct imaging techniques and scientific results. New and promising
wavefront sensing, coronagraphic and calibration techniques have been
developed by several groups in the last few years and are started to
be realized in laboratories. I will briefly review some of these
techniques, and show that they are rapidly getting ready for "prime
time" on existing and future telescopes. I will illustrate these
recent advances with two projects I am working on: 
- PECO, a 1.4m space telescope currently under study for NASA, has
sufficient sensitivity to image Earth-like planets around a few nearby
stars. 
- The Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme-AO system, which is aimed at
rapidly deploying new lab-proven techniques on a large ground-based
telescope, and will be seeing first light in a few months