I mean using our sun as a gravitational lens. There's a schematic at https://www.planetary.org/space-images/solar-gravity-lens-te...

One big problem (besides getting out there - hehe) is that you are looking in one very particular direction and need to move big distances (at a distance of ~500 au from the sun) to look elsewhere. I guess you could wait until the planet you are aiming at does another orbit around its star and flies through your point of focus again.

PS Voyager launched in 1971 and is now at 158 au! These distances are truly vast. 1 light year is 63241 au.

I don’t know anything specific about what the parent is proposing, but I imagine it is using the mass of the sun as a gravitational lens. Because of the solar radiation there isn’t really much sunlight (read:any) that is directly reflected to an observer peering on the edge of the sun.. light travels in straight lines.

Basically, the way scientists used a solar eclipse to confirm the theory of relativity and gravitational lensing of stars ‘behind’ the sun to in front of it. Or like the way certain objects were lensed in the massive JWST shot that came out a couple months ago.

But beyond that I know nothing

They take pictures at night when there’s no sunlight.

When you are using the sun as a gravitational lens you block out the sun and look at the area of the sky around the sun.

There's a wikipedia page for the concept at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens