Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2020

36 MARCH-APRIL 2020 OUR EXPERIENCES The situation changed when I left the university, dedicating myself to teaching, joining an astronomical group and, above all, taking the op- portunity to collaborate on a radio program of scientific populariza- tion. The program in question is called “Un Punto Azul” in honor of Carl Sagan, a popularizer admired by all who probably triggered the spark of astronomy and the desire to spread it among many of us. We started as an experiment, but it stopped being just an experiment many years ago. In this 2019-2020 season, we have completed twenty years of transmission, a duration that very few radio programs can boast. As the reader may imagine, in that period, we went through many different situations: crises, successes, interruptions, changes of all kinds. The site of diffusion and the collaborators have changed, but above all we have personally experienced the evolution of the media, of the tools that must be used to reach the listeners, and also the change of our listeners’ wishes. A striking example of this evolution is the way we broadcast the pro- gram. We started from a modulated frequency (FM) station called “Radio Frontera,” which took its name from the city from which we still broadcast, Jerez de la Frontera, broadcasting live, sometimes with- out recording the program and without replicated broadcasts. Af- terwards, we were able to record the broadcasts, thus being able to replicate them. At the time, we learned to take advantage of the Internet and the ability to upload our programs to the web in order to allow our listeners to follow them when they wanted − what we now call podcasts. This step was our first big revolution, to go beyond traditional listeners (with a radio device) and open up to anyone who had a computer or music player and, of course, wanted to listen to sci- ence and expand their knowledge. The other great revolution we ex- perienced (and we still experience) was technical and decisively influ- enced the quality of the program. In the radio studios we frequent today (belonging to the University of Cadiz, in particular, those of Radio INDESS), in addition to hav- ing modern audio equipment and facilities, the simple incorporation of the Skype app into our recording device has allowed us to conduct in- terviews that we never thought of doing. We no longer have geo- graphical barriers with our respon- dents, and we can interview Span- ish scientists everywhere in our country and even those who work abroad. At the same time, we also noticed an evolution in the type of listeners who follow us. We moved from the neighborhood listener, with mere curiosity about some sci- entific topic, to the student who uses multiple social networks and digital devices, up to other astron- omy amateurs or scien- tific professionals who listen to us and also col- laborate sporadically in our broadcasts. This re- sult makes us happy and enriches us consider- ably. One thing has not changed since our in- ception: we always have opened the program to questions and doubts from listeners to clarify fake news or misunder- standings of scientific news, and these ques- tions have not dimin- ished, as might have Spreading astronomy on the radio P hoto of the first broad- casts of “Un Punto Azul” at the facil- ities of Frontera Radio, in Jerez de la Frontera.