I remember sitting in on a conference talk by a person (possibly Rainer Blatt) doing research with trapped ions (or single atoms strongly coupled to light in an optical cavity), and the person showed a photo of the trap with dots of light from the fluorescence of the single atoms/ions. I thought the person mentioned you could see this with the naked eye b/c the optical coupling to the ion in the trap was so strong, but thinking about it now I'm not sure if this can be true and I can't seem to find any (obvious) reference to this in the literature.
So my question: Is it possible to see light from a strongly coupled single atom or ion with the naked eye? If so can you point me to a reference (and hopefully an image of this as well)?
Note: The best I can find is the image below from the Blatt research group taken with a CCD (details here). However it is not at all obvious that this would be visible to the naked eye, or if the exposure was just set very high on the camera.