Almost forgot to look in our own backyard

tbf, discovering Uranus was a lot less deadly before modern icebreaking ships. Age of Sail ships did not do well down there, and the economic incentives of sealing resulted in quite a lot of casualties back in the day. Doing math and peering through telescopes is much safer.
- You say this, but you've never seen me try to math

I assure you that Uranus has been observed many times by many people dating far back into the past, such as by Hipparchos in 2nd Century BC. They conclusively figured out exactly what it was in 1846.
- Twenty centuries of wondering what it is, until someone snapped and said “listen, it’s Uranus, are you happy now?”
- Well back then, people didn't wear many clothes, so if they bent over you'd see right up their bums.

Well, we currently know better the moon's surface than our oceans' bottom, so...
- It's almost like building telescopes is a bit easier than month-long marine expeditions.
  Well I guess it's not immediately apparent. But in hindsight, the kind of telescope you need to see the moon or Uranus isn't quite the investment that a dangerous expedition to unknown lands or the bottom of the sea entails. Nor an observatory or space-bourne telescope for that matter. And you can't use a telescope to discover a continent on earth unless you were already in space.
  
  Yup, if I'm not mistaken, more people went on the Moon than to Challenger Deep. I'm wondering if it would be the same case if the Cold War hadn't started the race to the Moon.

I don’t know about you, but I find seeing things to be much easier when there isn’t a planet obscuring it.

Piri reis knew of Antarctica back in the 16th century or something I unno I am no earth scientist
- Ooh old cartography I can actually call semi bullshit on this. Basically we knew about a fuckoff big landmass we now call Antarctica (then hypothesized to be Terra Australis) due to the ocean currents around it, but we kept fucking up its location for some reason. Misidentification of Antarctica got so bad that Australia was the most nothern part of it hence why the naming is wrong.
  Also a lot of maps made Tierra del Fuego look like it was part of the at the time hypothesized Terra Australas, as I said the misidentification problem got real fucking bad at times. But yeah we knew there was a continent or somethijg down there we just couldnt get to the damned thing because it was too hazardous.
- No idea wtf that's supposed to translate as.

I read about the Antarctic. They kept running into walls of ice before they could find/see it.
- To get near Antarctica while sailing south, you have to first cross what seems like a wide barrier of perpetually stormy seas with huge rogue waves.
  In fact, it was in one of these storms that veered more north than usual, that a sailing vessel - can't remember if it was British, Dutch or Portuguese - got picked up, then tossed and turned for days, and once it was finally over, the crew found themselves in extremely cold seas, very similar to those at northern latitudes.