I would imagine that both the star and the planet if actually shown properly 'to scale' in the image would be tiny pin pricks. What you would see if you were '

I would imagine that both the star and the planet if actually shown properly 'to scale' in the image would be tiny pin pricks. What you would see if you were 'standing there' is quite different to what you see in the image. The fact that the planet and star appear much larger is probably caused by a few factors - firstly the planet is probably only taking up a few pixels on the telescopes CCD - The image has been enlarged and post processed. Secondly the telescope will be affected by diffraction which means you will not get a proper single tiny point of light and instead will get something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Airy-pattern.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Airy-pattern.svg Finally you need to deal with all the air that the light has to travel through before hitting the telescopes CCD - this will distort the final image, like looking at the bottom of a pond through ripples.