I was born legally blind. My first sharply focused view of the stars was through my maternal grandfather's binoculars as he cradled me in his arms. From him I first learned which of those stars were planets; which suns. From both grandfathers I acquired the yearning to see and visit the planets we agreed must orbit those other suns.

My overwhelming impulse Thursday when I learned astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have taken the first visible-light snapshot of a planet orbiting another star, was to call Grandaddy Hinnant.

HR 8799 and planets

A group led by astronomer Christian Marois of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia, used infrared to image a family of three planets orbiting HR 8799, a star some 130 light-years away.

This is a caption version of one of those infrared images.

B.L. Hinnant has been gone more than four decades, but seeing the images of Fomalhaut b, a tiny point source of light orbiting the nearby, bright southern star Fomalhaut, was somehow no less the realization of a shared dream.

The team which discovered Fomalhaut B was led by astronomer Paul Kalas of the University of California, Berkeley.

Later I learned another group, led by astronomer Christian Marois of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia, used ground-based, infrared to image a family of three planets orbiting the start HR 8799. And I yearned to somehow sit down and talk this over with both grandfathers, as I would while they were lived.

Of course it is impossible for me to visit either of those planetary systems. Fomalhaut is 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis, and the cloud you see in the false-color image above is a debris disk about 21.5 billion miles across.

Fomalhaut b is orbiting 1.8 billion miles inside the debris disk's sharp inner edge.

Indeed, the images in which Fomalhaut b was discovered were made in October 2004 and July 2006, and scientists were not able to pick out the planet until the end of May of this year.

HR 8799 is some 130 light-years away and the final images of the orbiting objects were captured this year. There are questions about whether all of the orbiting objects are even small enough to be properly called planets, and they are all apparently huge by planetary standards.

Still, it was Grandaddy George Frink who taught me to accept the impossible. Accept it as impossible, and find a way around it. So I remain confident that in defiance of current capabilities and current understanding of physics, the sons of men will yet walk on the surface of extrasolar planets.

Making and interpreting the images reproduced here was itself impossible all those years ago when a child who could see nothing clearly that was more than a few inches from his eyes, first looked up in wonder through his grandfather's field glasses and saw the field of stars.