311.366 - 2016 project and astronomy

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

astronomy

yes, astronomy!  physics and chemistry's grandest laboratory!  and worst.  an astronomer cannot set up initial conditions for an experiment.  he or she has to say "I think it (some aspect of astronomy) works like this (description)" then look at a thousand or so examples and find no counterexamples.  a physicist has a much easier job:  he or she sets up the initial conditions in his lab to agree with the initial conditions in his or her problem then runs the experiment one, two, three, or a dozen times and if the outcome in the laboratory always agrees with the description predicted, then voila!  he or she has learned something.  either way, what a wonderful thing!  to have learned a little more about how the universe works.  to have opened up new questions we didn't even know we had before that experiment succeeded!  now, to me, astronomers are right up there with theoretical physicists.  as I understand it - be leery:  I did graduate work in physics but I took classes in physics, that's different from becoming a physicist - a theoretical physicist sees a pattern in some group of experiments that no one else has seen before, and from that pattern deduces a law or rule that the universe seems to follow.  he or she finds a mathematical way to describe that group of experiments that allows predictions to be made from it (the mathematics), then describes other experiments that might confirm or invalidate his or her predictions.  an astronomer looks at - I don't know.  pictures of stars?  of nebulae?  of galaxies?  of clusters of galaxies?  looks, perhaps, at a collection of deductions astronomers have already made and proved, and sees some pattern that no one else has discerned, sees some mathematics that describe those results.  wow!  I look at astronomy pictures and see magnificence, see glory, see wonder.  that's as close as I can get.  if I wore a hat or even a cap, I'd take it off to people who can do that kind of work - see the mathematics of magnificence, of glory, of wonder, and predict new outcomes we hadn't thought to look for.  please, gentlemen and ladies, continue.