RADIO ASTRO

Radio Astro is one of the many support projects of the IAU General Assembly 2024. This pioneering project will stream conference highlights to a global audience on a daily basis.

The content is being presented by a team of aspiring young broadcasters, eager to upskill themselves to be science/technology communicators. These youngsters from Cape Town’s indigent communities are students of the Bridges4Music Academy, and for them this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Under the watchful eyes of professional mentors, such as Bobby Brown and broadcast specialist, author and award-winning radio executive Baydu Adams, they will do all the heavy lifting – from show prep to editing audio packages and anchoring engaging interviews with delegates and guests, while keeping it entertaining and informative.

To this end, Radio Astro will be run like a commercial radio station to give them a complete and holistic work-experience that they will immediately be able to apply in a commercial broadcast environment.

The livestream is being re-broadcast by dozens of community radio stations, giving their remote audiences access to the valuable information. We ask that you share this information with community and/or commercial radio stations in your locality, to give them the option to do the same.

The daily programming has been designed according to simulcast standard practice, which means the stations will be able to take entire audio pieces, or edit as they require. We will be happy to supply them with daily schedules and show clocks, for their own planning purposes. Email media@astronomy2024.org for more information.

• We start broadcasting from 10 am on Monday, 5 August 2024 and continue until 6 pm on Thursday, 15 August 2024.
• We broadcast for eight hours every day, including Saturday, 10 August 2024.
• There are four shows per day, each lasting two hours.
• While every show will be hosted by our team of passionate young broadcasters, they will be supervised by skilled professions providing training and guidance on the go.

The livestream can be accessed at https://linktr.ee/radioastro. You are welcome to share this link far and wide, as the livestream is made available free-of-charge. Stations may sell advertising around the planned content to generate extra revenue for themselves.

Radio Astro is made possible by a grant from the International Astronomical Union’s Astronomy for Development program.

About Bobby Brown

An award-winning veteran of the South African media landscape, Bobby Brown has contributed to the country’s most reputable conventional and new media outlets. Making the transition from TV to radio broadcaster, Bobby is a tech reporter, science communicator and multi-media corporate coach and consultant, with international experience. He moved from Talk Radio 702, 567MW Cape Talk and Kfm 94.5 to launch Smile 90.4FM, where he hosted the Breakfast Show for ten years, guiding it to the success it has become. Currently the host of the Breakfast Show on Magic828 AM, Bobby is also a newspaper opinion writer, podcaster, blogger, website contributor, entrepreneur and sought-after tech-event MC and moderator. He is a founding Advisory Board member of the Cape Town Chapter of the reputable international cyber security certification body ISC2.