Ah, right. (There's also the fact that we can take avantage of the parallax caused by our orbit. Just remembered.)

I guess we'd need some sort of relay if we really wanted to communicate with a craft orbiting opposite to us relative to the sun.

Yeah, the coolest thing about the sun, imo, is that while a particle of light only takes a few minutes to reach earth, it can take millions of years to escape the tumultuous interior of the sun to radiate in the first place.

Whaaat ! you mean photons bounce about inside the sun for this long?? but how would we measure the time it takes for a given particle to escape it? I imagine this number comes from a theoretical model?