A reader remarks on solar lensing:
It looks to me (from brief Google search) that the Oort Cloud starts about 1,000 AU out from the Sun and extends to about 100,000 AU. It also appears that Voyager 1 is only just beyond 100 AU, slightly beyond the Termination Shock and the Heliopause.
So, this gravitational lensing point is way out there. It may take quite a while to get a telescope put in place there, but it definitely sounds worth doing. It’ll also take a couple hours to get radio signals from such a telescope back to earth (1 AU is about 9 light minutes, is it not?).
Lastly, at that distance, I suspect our Sun looks like a speck, maybe just a bright star.
Ah, I see the linked linked article mentions 550 AU as the distance involved.
And another reader issues a correction of the first:
A couple hours? Neptune is 4 light-hours away from Earth and it’s a hell of a lot closer to us than the Oort cloud. This page puts the Oort cloud at about a YEAR away from us at light speed:
Nice to have someone else do the work for me.
