The Kepler data has already revealed many surprises. Our solar system may be far from typical. In some systems, planets as big as Jupiter are circling so close to their star that their “year” lasts only a few days. Some planets orbit binary stars – there would be two “Suns” in their sky. But we’d really like to see these planets directly – not just their “silhouettes” as they pass in front of their parent star. And that’s hard. To realise just how hard, suppose an alien astronomer with a powerful telescope was viewing the Earth from 30 light years away — the distance of a nearby star. It would seem, in Carl Sagan’s phrase, a “pale blue dot”, very close to a star (our Sun) that far outshines it: a firefly next to a searchlight.