Kepler 7b "image"

The first crude image of cloud cover of an exoplant has been inferred!

A lighter color, more clouds(?), currently in the western portion of the planet from our perspective.  I'm trying to think of how to describe how amazing this is. Not to be misleading, this is still a long way from what we would normally think of as an image of a planet, but it is the very beginning to starting to resolve structure of what an exoplanet actually looks like--not an artist's imagination.  It is orbiting the star Kepler 7 which is--and this is an unimaginable understatement--a long way away from our solar system.  Imagine if in a few years we can start to get more image resolution and piece together weather systems, continents; what about patterns of possible light pollution! 

Update: Here is a link to the original article.   Also, I was able to find a reference to the distance: ~1,000 light years!  So it was a cloudy day, over the western portion of the planet, 1,000 years ago; we are looking back into the past because the light took a millennium to reach Earth.