Yup, all stars other than the Sun are below our ability to resolve as anything other than a point, so they do indeed look dimmer than the Sun to us. The invers

Yup, all stars other than the Sun are below our ability to resolve as anything other than a point, so they do indeed look dimmer than the Sun to us. The inverse square law always applies, but it relates to the total amount of light received by a constant area observer (or density at a pointlike observer). Once you're projecting the image of the source onto a plane with a lens, that doesn't map to surface brightness. Another place where the inverse square law breaks down is with beams of light, in the near field - consider something like a laser beam. While it will expand, and eventually follow the law once you get far enough, it very much doesn't at close range. And there's an interesting parallel here: to an observer, a collimated laser beam looks like a perfect pointlike object at infinity (modulo the diffraction limit, of course). Another way to see it is that focusing a beam of light in a certain way creates a virtual emitter much further away, and so you need to add that to the distance you plug into the inverse square law.