Two of my cousins (twins, as an anecdotal fun fact) are both astronomers. I remember one of them explaining to me how little of their job is actually looking at badass pictures of space objects but instead staring at numbers representing badass happenings in space.
The fun part to me is when they explain what they’re seeing in the numbers in layperson’s terms. One of them published on evidence of “star theft” when two galaxies pass near/through one another, how the composition of some stars signal they once belonged to a different galaxy than their current home. Fascinating to think about cosmic events as large as two galaxies passing near/through one another.