What's an Astronomer do?

You know, thinking back on it, as a child, I always believed that astronomers were the old guys with thick glasses that spent all their time staring into space (no doubt an image with direct correlation to the image of ancient Greek philosophers pondering the Earths' place in the universe) - a profession that didn't particularly interest me, despite my keen interest in space. As I grew up a little bit more, I came to realize that there was so much more to the stars. My knowledge of space grew with my years, and of course, with steadily increasing knowledge of astronomy, I came to understand just how little I actually knew. I always wondered what an astronomer did, and of course, I came up with many ideas - some realistic, and some a little more wild. These ideas included anything ranging from the image of Neil Armstrong hopping around on the moon to something straight out of Star Trek.
Then, as fate would have it, I came along into college, as a Physics major, and harsh reality finally set in. I came to understand the depth of astrophysics, the sheer amount of mathematical and theoretical knowledge required to be a decent astrophysicist shattered my illusions and gave me my current understanding of what it means to observe the stars. From what I imagine, it is a lot of time spent doing very complicated math in order to try and understand the unimaginably huge universe and the phenomenons happening day by day within it. On some occasions, an astrophysicist may get the opportunity to put their theory into practice by going to one of the major observatories around the world and seeing for themselves if their work has paid off. Needless to say, there is much more to what is seen by an astronomer than simply stars and planets far far away. The universe is anything but empty, filled not just with countless variations of stars and planets, but other peculiar products of which we realistically know very little, such as dark matter. As the premier authorities on anything not of planet earth, astrophysicists are tasked with the daunting duty of observing, understanding, and explaining what happens in our universe, in order to understand where we all came from, and what will become of us. It is a difficult and mind-boggling profession with some seriously difficult math and theory involved. It is something that, from what I can understand, is at once both frighteningly interesting, and profoundly difficult. Of course, I still like to imagine that this is what all of our astrophysics professors look like when they work...