If I wanted to get a BA in say..Astronomy..could you get a BA in that? What are some of the required courses to get a 4 year BA in Astronomy?

I ask people someone once told me you can't get a BA in a science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_of_Science

You want a BS.

BA = Bachelor of Arts

BS = Bachelor of Science

I have loads of BS.

Good to see that it only took 1 post for someone to make that joke .

Some fields have both BAs and BS. There are some universities that appear to offer a BA in Astronomy.

However, why anyone would want a BA in a field where there are BSc's available is beyond me.

Perhaps this breakdown will help:

Hope that helps.

i see. thanks!

One more question: why does astronomy require so much mathematics? I think of an astronomer as someone who knows a lot about the universe, the cosmos, galaxies, definitions, etc, where does the math come in? Like say a tour guide at a exploratorium etc, isn't he an astronomer? there is no math involved in that. just knowledge of things. or is that called something different?

edit: i typed in "science" when i meant math.

There is a ton of math involved in that stuff.

You're confusing someone who likes stargazing with someone who does astronomy.

Neither of which is the tour guide at an observatory. He's someone who couldn't care less about anything and is just regurgitating information he was spoon fed during job training for the umpteenth time in his life while thinking about how many people he could kill in the group that no one would notice missing.

hahahahahahaha

I wonder if the local observatory is hiring......

To clarify: real astronomy is about tracking celestial bodies, calculating their trajectory, calculating their speed, calculating their mass, calculating their distance, calculating their energy output, calculating, calculating, and more calculating. Being able to see a light color and know the wavelength of it.

Stargazing is looking up in the night skies and saying "oh pretty" and naming some constellations and other definitional crap.

Because you're using math to calculate how fast things are moving, how far apart they are, calculating the routes of satellites/probes/shuttles, etc, including gravity's impact on them. There's a whole lot of math that's in play when you're studying the cosmos.

Hope that helps.