How can we see the oldest light with stars and planets acting as obstacles on the path of light
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There are actually two ideas involved in this situation. The first is tha there are plenty of “gaps” in every direction where light travelling in a straight line from the moment of its creation encounters nothing but empty space on its journey to our eyeballs (or telescopes). In fact, there’s far more gap than obstacle.
Second, even where there are obstacles, a lot of the light travelling from the far side of such obstacles to Earth is bent around the obstacles through a phenomena known as gravitational lensing. It’s a bit beyond ELI5, but any sufficiently massive object or collection of objects warps space around it changing the apparent path of light travelling near it. Under the right circumstances, beams of light are bent around the obstacle rather than being blocked by it.
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