  The Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) project is an
instrument on the Subaru telescope that is pushing the frontiers of what is
possible with ground-based high-contrast imaging of extrasolar planets. The
system features key breakthroughs in wavefront sensing and coronagraphy to
yield extremely high Strehl ratio corrections and deep planet-to-star
contrasts, even for optically faint stars. SCExAO is coupled to a near-infrared
integral field spectrograph -- CHARIS -- yielding robust planet spectral
characterization. In its first full year of operations, SCExAO has already
clarified the properties of candidate companions around $\kappa$ And, LkCa 15,
and HD 163296, showing the former to be a likely low-gravity, planet-mass
object and the latter two to be misidentified disk signals. SCExAO's planet
imaging capabilities in the near future will be further upgraded; the system is
emerging as a prototype of the kind of dedicated planet-imaging system that
could directly detect an Earth-like planet around a nearby low-mass star with
Extremely Large Telescopes like the Thirty Meter Telescope.
