The situation is far worse for viewing the surfaces of planets beyond our solar system. Although reflected sunlight from a planet is lost in the glare of the star's light, their contrast in the infrared can be hundreds of times greater because planets emit most of their light in the infrared. Even so, a 100 km patch of a planet like the earth is about 100,000 times fainter in the infrared than a similar sized piece of a star's surface. At 8 parsecs, only one photon from such a surface will pass through a one meter square collecting area every 20 minutes. At other wavelengths, we are left with an even narrower selection of objects bright enough to study.
Planets emit virtually no radio waves.
Only violent storms on stellar surfaces, supernovae, pulsars, stellar nurseries, maser spots, or galactic cores produce radio waves in detectable quantities. X-rays and ultraviolet light are the preferred spectral regions for studying young supernovae, neutron stars and the mysterious inner regions of black hole accretion disks. The universe seen with Supervision begins to thin out rapidly, with fewer and fewer interesting things to see for each additional dollar invested. A disturbing parallel to modern high-energy physics, where billions will be spent to find a 'missing' quark and the Higgs boson. If we had all the time in the world, even miniscule rates like one photon per minute, with a sufficiently long exposure time, could be amplified to give useable numbers of photons from which to form an image.