I feel it's much more difficult, for me at least, since what you are trying to do is manually adjusting your focus.
The further what you are trying to watch is, the less stressed your eyes are while mantaining focus. This means that if you want to defocus something close you can just relax your eyes, but the other way around is different. When it comes to observing an object our brain does everything for us and we don't really need to think about it.