Who wants glares in their photographs? Certainly not me and, apparently, not Webster Cash, director of University of Colorado at Boulder Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy.

"We would use the starshade as a giant hand to suppress the light emanating from a central star by a factor of about 10 billion," says Cash. He likens the coronagraph to an outfielder holding up one hand to block the sun and get a better view of the ball he is about to catch.

This device is not an entirely new concept. It has and is being used by Sun-watchers for a while now. They block out the main light from the sun giving them a good view of its surrounding. But conventional coronagraphs tend to have light spread out causing a bleeding around the edges. However, the proposed model eliminates this problem by diffracting the light away from the area close to the star, thus, giving us a crystal clear view.

Because the technology needed to make this project into a reality is available, an excited Cash said, "We will be able to study Earth-like planets tens of trillions of miles away and chemically analyze their atmospheres for signs of life."