  The mission of NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) is to find Earth-like
planets orbiting other stars and characterize the atmospheres of these planets
using spectroscopy. Because of the enormous brightness ratio between the star
and the reflected light from the planet, techniques must be found to reduce the
brightness of the star. The current favorite approach to doing this is with
interferometry: interfering the light from two or more separated telescopes
with a $\pi$ phase shift, nulling out the starlight. While this technique can,
in principle, achieve the required dynamic range, building a space
interferometer that has the necessary characteristics poses immense technical
difficulties. In this paper, we suggest a much simpler approach to achieving
the required dynamic range. By simply adjusting the transmissive shape of a
telescope aperture, the intensity in large regions around the stellar image can
be reduced nearly to zero. This approach could lead to construction of a TPF
using conventional technologies, requiring space optics on a much smaller scale
than the current TPF approach.
