Is it possible in a telescope to dim the light of a star so much and at the same time make a little light in

certain parts of the telescope in order to detect planets near the star? Opinions on this would be great. Thanks.

You are actually describing and well known and used method in observational astronomy. Essentially when you want to look at something that is fairly dim when it is next to something that is much brighter, you can cover your lens to block out light from the bright object in order to see the dim object. This is known as an Occulting Disk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occulting_d…

However, what you describe isn't really feasible. You could try to block out the star in order to see planets in other solar systems, but the problem is planets are so incredibly faint that even if you block out the parent star, you're not very likely to see the planet. I know of about two instances where it has been confirmed that a planet was imaged directly. Here is one of those images.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap081114.html

In practice it's just too hard to image exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) for this to be a reliable method. Although I should mention occulting disks are used frequently when looking at the sun. Such as if you wanted to see the much fainter atmosphere around the sun, you'd look at it with a disk blocking out the sun itself.

I know someone at Princeton using a similar method to block out the light from the main star using a mask and then let in the light from the planets; it's worked once or twice, but the star is so bright compared to the planet it's really hard to do it correctly.

It should be useful. http://findsth.info/455550/telescopes