In article ,
David Spain writes:
I was thinking in terms of "arcs" of reflected light
off a resolved planet more or less acting as a point of light that would
be seen over a long duration plot to detect orbital travel.

Exposure times are short compared to orbit times, so when planets are
directly imaged, they show up as point sources. My previous message
gave some examples, and the Introduction section in the Meshkat
article gives references to others.

I wasn't thinking in terms of gravitational lensing at all. But of
course that might be a better way to go if you don't have the
dynamic range to detect such faint images.

The idea is that when a foreground star lenses a background one, if
the foreground star has a planet, it can add to the lensing
signal. The timescale is much shorter, though, because the planet's
mass is much smaller than the star's mass. You might do web searches
on "Einstein radius" and on "microlensing."

Will the Webb telescope provide any additional capabilities in this
area?

The Near Infrared Camera has a coronagraph, which is intended to
block light from the star and allow planets to be imaged. (The
coronagraph has uses for other projects as well.) Together with the
large telescope aperture, which gives high angular resolution, it
should be possible to image planets much closer to their primary
stars than can be done now. Of course the planets have to be there
and be either large and shiny or large and hot, but there should be
some very nice images coming. I see there is one Early Release
Science project that includes imaging of one exoplanet:
https://jwst.stsci.edu/files/live/si...86-hinkley.pdf
The main goal of this project is to test the instrument; I'm sure
there will be more projects done.

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