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Comment by SturgeonsLaw | Hacker News Reader

That's incredible. How are the photons from the planet not entirely drowned out by those emanating from the sun?

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

This is the space project that most excites me and the one I most hope we solve in my lifetime. Much more interesting than Mars (not that you can't do both).

This video on gravitational lensing blew my mind https://youtu.be/NQFqDKRAROI

What do you think the odds are of if it being done IRL?

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

Here's the paper discussing this idea:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.11871.pdf

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

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