Terrestrial atmospheric lens

[1] The sun's image appears about a half degree above its real position during sunset due to Earth's atmospheric refraction.

[2] In 1998, NASA astrophysicist Yu Wang from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the first time proposed to use the Earth as an atmospheric lens.

Wang suggests in his paper that:[3]''If we could build a space telescope using the Earth's atmosphere as an objective lens the aperture of such space telescope would be the diameter of the earth.

Telescope resolution could be enhanced by up to seven orders of magnitude and would enable detailed images of planets in far away stellar systems.''

Its high resolution would allow to directly image nearby Earth-like planets with a level of detail never seen before.