Astronomy is a Pseudoscience

On the topic of astronomy there is a view that, for whomever may practice it, astronomy is a pseudoscience.

Being restricted by location and access, the astronomer is at a disadvantage. Astronomy does not, and can not, follow the Scientific Method; which is an empirical method of inquiry which demands that hypothesis is tested with experiment. The astronomer cannot put the stars under controlled experimental conditions to demonstrate ideas and come to the truth of a matter, as a chemist can do with his or her materials. The astronomer can only observe and interpret—a scientific fallacy which hinders truth and progress.

From Copernicus to Stephen Hawking, its practitioners publish works but fail to perform experiments to verify the hypothesis put fourth, such as the Expanding Universe - the hypothesis of the metric expansion of space. Scientists in other fields are expected to perform experiments to come to their conclusions, and so we must ask, why not the astronomers?

A Yale astronomy course explains:

The Department of Astronomy at UW-Madison states:

The Scientific Method
The Scientific Method is a method of inquiry, expected even of school children, where an experiment is made to confirm or disprove a hypothesis.



Without experimentation, the steps of the Scientific Method are unable to be fulfilled. The researcher of the science is left in the dark to build one hypothesis upon the next: A 'house of cards' model of nature without solid empirical foundations.

Definitions
The reader may decide from contemporary sources whether astronomy, or any other field of science which relies on observation and interpretation, fits the definition of a pseudoscience.

Oxford Dictionary
The Oxford Dictionary defines pseudoscience as (Archive)

Wikipedia
From the first sentence of the Wikipedia article on pseudoscience (Archive) we see:

Phys.org
Science website phys.org says:

How scientists can learn what distinguishes science from pseudoscience (Archive)

Livescience
According to What is Science? (Archive) on livescience.com we read:

Dictionary.com
Dictionary.com defines the scientific method:

US Supreme Court
The US Supreme Court (1993) in Daubert v. Merrell made a determination (Archive) of what qualifies as "scientific knowledge":

Maxim Sukharev
Physics Professor Maxim Sukharev of Arizona State University says (Archive):

Chemical Times & Trends
Chemical Times & Trends, Volume 23 states:

Edgar Zilsel
In The Social Origins of Modern Science (Archive), historian and philosopher of science Edgar Zilsel, Ph.D. (1891-1944) informs us:

Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon, father of the Scientific Method, said:

Karl Popper
In Conjectured and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowlege, 1989, Karl Popper (bio) states:

Hannes Alfvén
Electrical engineer and plasma physicist Hannes Alfvén stated:

Max Planck
See these wise words of Nobel Prize winner, physcist Max Planck: