What Do Modern Astronomers Do?

It seems that much of modern astronomy requires data analysis and the use of computers to perform calculations and create models.  Astronomers no longer observe only in the visible spectrum – they use, for example, radio waves, UV and infrared to observe the universe.  This requires receivers and amplifiers to transmit signals/information which then has to be recorded, displayed and analyzed.  The information is often collected over time, as with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which was launched in 2001 to measure the temperature of microwave background radiation, and streamed data through 2012¹.   

  As astronomers try to look at increasingly distant objects, interferometers have become widely used.  Two important examples are the CHARA array² at the Mount Wilson obervatory and LIGO³.  The CHARA array continously has research projects in progress, but the 60- and 100-inch telescopes are not as frequently used.  LIGO is a ground-based interferometer that was designed to detect gravitational waves.  In a lecture given by Kip Thorne, he stated that gravitational waves are the future of cosmology, along with numerical relativity (don’t ask, I did not understand anything about this part of his lecture.  All I know is it involves computing power).  He then showed a computer model prediction of what happens when two black holes collide.

So basically, my point in all this is that regardless of the field, I think astronomers spend less time looking at objects through a telescope and spend a lot of time waiting for data and then analyzing it and using computer models for simulations and predictions of things we cannot yet observe or test through experiment.

NOTE: I highly recommend checking out these sources for anyone not familiar with interferometers, particularly CHARA and LIGO.  These links contain basic explanations along with all the technical reports, so you can learn everything you could ever want to know from these sources.
¹ For more information on WMAP and radio astronomy, see NASA’s websites: http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/radioastronomy/radioastronomy_all.pdf

² http://www.mtwilson.edu/sci.php,

http://www.chara.gsu.edu/CHARA/techreport.php

³ http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/