[lmilcin]

There is a lot of occasions for observations if you are into it.

This photo is not a happy accident, though. It took careful preparation.

Let's see... it looks that at a distance of 400km we can see features of size roughly 1m (or even better). This points to resolution of 0.01 arcsecond which is fenomenal for an amateur setup.

[gliptic]

That's not quite right. 1 meter at 400 km distance is ~0.51 arcseconds, which is on the edge of doable with good seeing. 0.01 arcseconds would never be possible within the atmosphere.

[jcims]

The most depressing statistic here (for me anyway) is that to directly image the nearest exoplanet at 1km per pixel we're going to need a telescope with ~.000000005 arcseconds of resolution.

Someone check my math but that would be like imaging the ISS at the nanometer scale from the surface of the earth.

[elboru]

A few months ago the ISS passed through my city during sunset, while me and my family were hanging out outside. It was an amazing experience. I saw it first, it was reflecting the sun so it looked like a shooting star but it was too slow for a shooting star and too fast for a plane. It was too bright for it to be satellite? So I googled ISS position and it matched! We were able too see it for a while.