[_hl_]

Huh, very interesting- and counterintuitive that distance matters. If anyone here knows why I’d love to learn more!!

EDIT: maybe not so counterintuitive after all: if you scale everything up, you get a higher fidelity sensor and more signal to noise. Same reason telescopes want to be big: to collect more light especially from dim signals. Distance of the occulter then reduces perspective distortion that would eclipse the inner parts of the sensor more than the outer ones. Just my speculation though.