I'll drop in once in a while to see what's happening. For a perspective, I'm an old guy like Steve. I majored in astronomy at Harvard and graduated in 1967. TV science star (Discovery Channel and others) Michio Kaku (we knew him as Mike) (a year behind me) was my lab partner in one of the physics classes I took. Carl Sagan was an assistant professor, who didn't get tenure. He didn't teach the standard courses, so I never had him as a teacher. One of my roommates took his non-majors general ed class for upper division students - "The Planets - Their environments and inhabitants." and thought he was great. As far as I know, Carl had not yet moved into the popularization of science. The rumor we heard was that the older, more conservative faculty didn't like that his areas of interest were not traditional astronomy (he was doing planets!) and he drove a convertible, and was living with a woman (Linda who did become his second wife) who was not his wife. Cornell picked him up right away and he become a full professor quite quickly. One of his grad students, Dave Morrison, who has become quite well known as a planetary scientist at NASA, was my TA in our junior year astronomy majors course. His first wife, Nancy, was one of my classmates - one of about 10 astronomy majors out of 1500 students.
I went on to UC Berkeley (starting there in the "Summer of Love") where I got my PhD, studying the atmospheres of stars, particularly red supergiants, called "Mira" variables.
The '60's were very eventful in astronomy, with discoveries of pulsars, quasars, black holes, the cosmic background radiation (the first and still best observational evidence of the origin of the universe - the BIG BANG).
Astronomy is still a small field, when I entered the Berkeley graduate program, it was one of the larger programs in the country - about 35 grad students in total. At that time, physicists started encroaching into astronomy, which has continued to the present. There is no astronomy Nobel Prize, but quite a few astronomers have won the Physics prize. The 2011 and 2006 Nobel Prizes in Physics were both won by astronomers at UC Berkeley. The big prize at Berkeley is that if you win the Nobel prize, you get to have a named parking space on campus.
Larry
completed in use in 2024 and able to study the atmosphere of other planets in different starsystems