Two of my cousins (twins, as an anecdotal fun fact) are both astronomers. I remember one of them explaining to me how little of their job is actually looking at badass pictures of space objects but instead staring at numbers representing badass happenings in space.
The fun part to me is when they explain what they’re seeing in the numbers in layperson’s terms. One of them published on evidence of “star theft” when two galaxies pass near/through one another, how the composition of some stars signal they once belonged to a different galaxy than their current home. Fascinating to think about cosmic events as large as two galaxies passing near/through one another.
When astronomers first detected extrasolar planets it was "just a periodic dip in the light intensity of the sun" (the graphs look funny because the absolute amount of dip is tiny compared to the full output of the star) but now they're starting to be able to do direct imaging. I like direct imaging and other techniques a lot more than ones that are purely numerical, or require reconstruction.
Those tiny deeps means less time looking at nothing with direct imaging and much higher likely that something will actually be seen. Those tiny dips also help loosen the grip on the purse strings when it comes to financing new projects to peer at those tiny dips.
To OC: Skimming the paper, I think a lot of the “witnessing” is in the form of numerical data.