[db48x]

I don’t think the telescope has to be sitting next to you. Actual astronomers take pictures remotely all the time. They don’t ride a shuttle up to the Hubble Telescope when it’s their turn to take pictures with it, they put coordinates into a website. Even most ground–based observatories are often operated remotely. Many of them are visited by astronomers too, but more and more that’s an optional step.

Many astronomers work at yet another remove from operations. They don’t even take the pictures themselves! They collect data from other people’s observations instead! A lot of modern observatories collect so much data that there’s not enough people to look at everything in detail. Whole–sky observatories that take hundreds of photos to image the whole sky every night, satellite missions like GAIA that observed a billion stars to determine their position and velocities, etc, etc.