  One of the primary goals of exoplanet science is to find and characterize
habitable planets, and direct imaging will play a key role in this effort.
Though imaging a true Earth analog is likely out of reach from the ground, the
coming generation of giant telescopes will find and characterize many planets
in and near the habitable zones (HZs) of nearby stars. Radial velocity and
transit searches indicate that such planets are common, but imaging them will
require achieving extreme contrasts at very small angular separations, posing
many challenges for adaptive optics (AO) system design. Giant planets in the HZ
may even be within reach with the latest generation of high-contrast imagers
for a handful of very nearby stars. Here we will review the definition of the
HZ, and the characteristics of detectable planets there. We then review some of
the ways that direct imaging in the HZ will be different from the typical
exoplanet imaging survey today. Finally, we present preliminary results from
our observations of the HZ of {\alpha} Centauri A with the Magellan AO system's
VisAO and Clio2 cameras.
