The light is increasingly redshifted, so for practical purposes it disappears from view quite quickly. The more sensitive the instrument, the longer you can ob

The light is increasingly redshifted, so for practical purposes it disappears from view quite quickly. The more sensitive the instrument, the longer you can observe, and this doesn't really have a limit - as sensitivity approaches infinity, so does the length of time you could continue to observe the object. But for practical purposes, we would not see a black hole as some sort of weird psuedo-magnet with all sorts of junk stuck to the edge of the event horizon.