James Graham presents a public talk at UC Berkeley on May 16, 2009, in celebration of the International Year of Astronomy, as part of the series described at astro.berkeley.edu/iya . The last few years have seen a revolution in the study of planets because we now have detections of nearly 250 planetary systems. These detections are indirect, based on observation of the parent star (eclipses or changes in velocity that betray orbital motion). The next step in this adventure is to see these planets directly. Direct detection is exceedingly hard; for example, Jupiter is about a billion times fainter than our Sun.

Prof. Graham was a member of the first team to successfully take a photograph of a planet orbiting another star - a feat hailed as one of Time Magazine's 10 biggest scientific breakthroughs of 2008. He is the Chair of the Department of Astronomy at UC Berkeley.

Videography and editing by Chris Klein. This video is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License - creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us