> trying to notice it from interplanetary/interstellar distances That's the difficult part. "Visually" means different things when dealing with those distances

> trying to notice it from interplanetary/interstellar distances That's the difficult part. "Visually" means different things when dealing with those distances. Often what we get from a whole star system is the equivalent of a few pixels worth of light. That's literally all we have to work with. If we are lucky we might be able to detect a planet orbiting the star if it happens to partially cover the star while we are looking at it. Still, it is surprising the amount of information that astrophysics can get from such a meager amount of data.