December 30, 2015 7:58 pm

This Friday, Travel Back in Time with Chris Hardwick and Neil deGrasse Tyson

In past years, we’ve finished our season at the end of the year.

But this year, Season 6 won’t be ending until February, in part to give us the time to make the podcast versions of our shows that have run first as episodes of #StarTalkTV on The National Geographic Channel.

That’s also the reason we haven’t asked you to tell us your Fan Favorite episodes in our yearly survey, which we use to make our Time Capsule episodes.

So just like TV used to have a standard season, and now, thanks to Cable TV, we have short seasons, long seasons, mid-season finales, Winter finales, etc., the StarTalk Radio podcast season is morphing.

For our last episode of 2015, airing this Friday, we’re climbing into the T.A.R.D.I.S. and traveling back to Nov. 13, 2011, to revisit “Time Lords: The Science of Keeping Time”. And that Doctor Who reference is particularly relevant, because our co-hosts for this particular episode are none other than Chris Hardwick and Matt Mira. This is before Chris was the host of @midnight, and only one week after he began hosting Talking Dead on AMC, back when he was “only” the host of one of the most popular podcasts to ever get it’s geek on, The Nerdist.

Needless to say, if you know Chris and Matt, you know they are major Doctor Who fans.

The episode isn’t really about one particular Time Lord from Gallifrey, but instead it’s about the real time lords in our world. Our host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, enlisted the aid of a few guests who know a thing or two about time, clocks and calendars: Anthony Aveni, professor of astronomy and anthropology at Colgate University, Frank Reed, instructor of celestial navigation at Mystic Seaport, and Robert Seaman, computer programmer for the National Optical Astronomy Observatories.

You’ll find out about a Pope so powerful, he changed how the actual calendar we all use today works, from its previous incarnation as the Julian calendar into the current Gregorian one.

You’ll also learn why leap seconds are so critical to our GPS satellites, and discover what the Mayan Long Calendar was really predicting.

By the way, this is another of our “Extended Classics.” This week, we’ve added 12 minutes of new content from the “Cosmic Crib” (really just Neil’s office at the Hayden Planetarium). This week, Neil, Bill Nye and Steven Soter are sitting around talking about climate change. Seems like a timely subject, given the weird weather patterns we’ve all been living through recently. (I’m dreaming of a wet Christmas, filled with rain instead of snow…)

Please join us this Friday, January 1 at 7pm ET on our website, iTunesPodcasts, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and TuneIn.

And until then, everyone at StarTalk wishes you a “Happy New Year!”

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Jeffrey Simons