Qualifications
School's out for never. To keep up with the extreme competition of the field, you need pretty much every degree that you can possibly get...and then some. Start with a bachelor's degree, preferably in something like physics, science, or star-gazing, and then you can boogie your way out of commencement straight into a master's program.
After wasting some of your best years completing these degrees, you can use up your last good years completing a Ph.D in the field of astronomy for five to seven more, long years.
But it's not over yet. Now that you are basically a star-doctor, you've got to do at least one postdoctoral. That's another two or three years of working under senior astronomers who "know better"...and you'll probably want to do one or two more to really set yourself apart in the field of looking-at-sky.
In a short twenty years, you'll finally have all the required skills you couldn't have learned elsewhere: working in a team, analyzing data, conducting research, problem-solving, computer knowledge...all the stuff you would never know otherwise (source).