Salary
Average Salary: $106,000
Expected Lifetime Earnings: $4,425,288
Your life is basically a planetarium laser-show—you should be happy to do this for free. You're not? Well good news then, you'll get paid buckets of money. Which is good because you will have about ten years of student loans to pay off, but who's keeping track of all that?
In 2012, the lowest paid astronomers were still getting about $50,000 a year—and that is including people who teach a bunch of angsty teens to appreciate the stars at a public high school. The true ballers of the industry were making $162,000 a year. For every hour that you work, you could buy an iPod Shuffle and still get a steak sandwich at a nice restaurant.
You'll make more depending on where you work. Working at a museum/historical site or a college/university is going to get you a salary of about $80,000. But at the White House, you'll get a salary of about $115,000-$130,000 working for scientific research or the Federal Executive Branch. Yeah, you could fill most of a bathtub with that kind of cash (source).