Quote (lexrazor)
I have to disagree with you on that one. This is a picture of Vunus' clouds by Hubble.
Its taken in 1995 without the new repairs and upgrades on the telescope. Venus is closer to our Sun and as far as i can understand it has a UV filter to capture it.
Venus is a planet of OUR Sun. It is very FAR off our Sun, up to 47 degrees on the sky. Everyone can see it with naked eye in evening sky (winter 2011-2012). Other thing about planets around other stars - they are too close to parent stars on the sky (milliarcseconds) and too faint compared to their suns. There are only 12-13 planets discovered by direct imaging, and many hundreds discovered by other methods.
Quote (lexrazor)
And a picture of the Sun made with hubble using a filter to remove the lens flares.
Hubble never takes an image of Sun. It has no solar filters and has a very small field-of-view. To obtain such an image of full sun could take many hundreds of shots to combine them into a mosaic.
Quote (lexrazor)
Now, how is that different from taking a shot at an object 600 light years away?
Lets see how our Solar system looks from 600 ly. Maximum angular distance between the Sun and Jupiter from 600 ly is only 0.028". Resolution of Hubble is only 0.1", James Webb telescope has 2-3 times better resolution (this is a diffraction limit). So, Hubble or any other telescope of near future cannot see Jupiter separately from Sun from 600 ly. Lets take 60 ly, so Hubble can see Jupiter separately from Sun. But Jupiter is 750,000,000 times fainter than Sun. We should use the coronagraph to obscure light from star and try to see almost a billion times fainter planet.
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