About the Jodcast
What?
The Jodcast is a volunteer podcast about astronomy. It was set up by astronomers based at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory (now part of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics), but aims to cover astronomy carried out all over the world. A podcast is a combination of downloadable audio programmes (usually saved as an MP3) and XML. You can subscribe to any podcast's feed and your computer will periodically check for the latest programmes to download. Then you can listen online, on your MP3 player, burn it to a CD or even a cassette tape (if you listen to us in any other interesting way, let us know).
The Jodcast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike 2.0 England & Wales License so you can take it away and create stuff with it. If you do amazing (or even slightly interesting) things with our podcast we would love to hear about it. So far Jodcast listener Gurdonark has created the Jodsong.
When?
A new programme is released near the start and middle of each month. The exact timing of release depends on how busy we are with our day jobs.
Where?
We are based at Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire and at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics in Manchester. However, we will talk to astronomers based anywhere. If you happen to be an astronomer, why not drop us an email and we might interview you - however, we have a limited budget so if you live far away it will have to be via telephone or Skype.
Why?
As astronomers we love astronomy. We also love to tell other people about the things that interest us. Rather than talk to strangers on trains, we decided to make our own 'radio' show where we could ramble on. There were already a handful of astronomy podcasts in existence (see the links page) when we started but we thought we would add our own, slightly British, New Zealand, Australian and Dutch accents to the mix. We will also cover some aspects of astronomy that the others don't. Anyway, the more the merrier!
Why did we choose the name 'The Jodcast'? The name arose because Tim wasn't listening properly when Stuart was explaining what a podcast was. We know it is cheesy but we like it.
Who?
The Jodcast is made by several people, but there are three ring leaders; Nick Rattenbury (Dr Nick), Stuart Lowe (Dr Stuart) and Dave Ault (Doctor Who wannabe).
There are many parts to the Jodcast so here is a breakdown of who to blame credit. Dave writes most of the sci-fi rip-offs mini-dramas that feature at the start and end of each episode - they can be cheesy but it keeps him out of trouble. Nick is often found catching random astronomers and getting them to speak coherently for 15 minutes. Stuart attempts to keep the website and RSS feeds updated and pretends to be able to edit audio along with Dave. Stuart insists that he doesn't sound "like a farmer".
Each month Ian Morison gives us a round up of what we can see in the night sky, Tim O'Brien answers listener questions and Megan Argo tells us what's in the news. We also have contributions from several others including Roy Smits, Hannah Thrall, Paul Carr and Lisa Harvey-Smith. Matt Strong was responsible for printing our stylish Jodcast t-shirts.
During 2007 we also had a brilliant team of MSc/MPhil/PhD students who translated the news segment into many languages. They were Dandan Xu (Chinese), Neil Vaytet (French), Valerio Ribeiro (Portuguese), Sanhita Joshi (Hindi) and Mina Panahi/Mohammad Ebadinejad (Farsi).
Many thanks also go to the unfortunate friends of Dave who are roped into being characters in our intros and outros.
None of those involved with the Jodcast are actually paid to do this; we create it in our spare time (what's that?). We were going to put a cheesy picture here but someone forgot to put a flash card in the digital camera.
How?
The Jodcast is created by the hard work of several people (see Who? above) who do all this in their spare time. Since January 2007 the Jodcast has been proudly supported by grants from the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council and the Institute of Physics. These grants have been used to buy some portable recording kit and to make a special "Best of 2006" CD-ROM which we distributed to schools and educational groups.
The audio is brought together using the free Audacity with the Chris Capel's Dynamic Compressor plugin (following advice about the audio in Nov 2007 by listener Matt). The website is lovingly hand-crafted in HTML, CSS and XML. Initially, iTunes was used to add the ID3 tags but that is now done with Perl which is also used to keep the RSS updated, allow searching and keep the Astronomy Media Player going because "it can do everything except make a nice relaxing cup of tea". We are working on that though.
