After taking Physics 111, my perception of astronomy has changed a little. Before, I thought astronomers just took a lot of cool pictures of the night sky and I didn't give a whole lot of thought to what else with which they occupied their time.
It seems many astronomers have to travel a lot, as they go around the world to various telescopes (that's pretty cool! Free trip to Hawaii for time on Keck? Heck yeah!). Also, the massive collaborations that are going on and the amount of money the world, not just the U.S., investa into this (which is actually not that much, since we spend less on NASA in a year than we spend on air conditioning tents in Afghanistan). Still, the price tags are amazing to a college student living off hot dogs and noodles. Overall, astronomy feels like a lot bigger a field than it did before.
Another thing is, the textbook for an intro astronomy class is intimidating with all its equations! I can't imagine how bad it gets in graduate school and with special relativity. It's a good thing we got an equation sheet for our tests, and that covers probably less than a percent of one percent of the equations in the book. So what I'm trying to say is, we know a lot more about the Universe than I thought we did.
Yet with evidence of dark energy and dark matter, the accelerating universe, and brown dwarfs (and much, much more), there are still many discoveries being made and new questions arising that need answers.
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