Which telescope first produced direct images of an exoplanet?

Directly imaging a planet outside the Solar System is extremely difficult because the star’s glare usually overwhelms the planet. One of the early breakthroughs came with the Very Large Telescope in Chile, which helped produce direct images of 2M1207b in 2004, a giant planet orbiting a brown dwarf. More generally, direct imaging has since become an important method for studying wide-orbit giant exoplanets. It allows astronomers to analyze planetary light directly rather than inferring a planet only from its effects on a star.