Western University of Health Sciences

Matt Wedel

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Oh man, 2016, you are really working on my nerves.

Sometimes it's a positive balm to hold a piece of an animal dead and
gone for 145 million years, or stare at a thousand vertical feet of
sandstone, and know that we are all ants.

These lovelies here intrigue me deeply. They're three of the caudal
vertebrae recovered from the Snowmass *Haplocanthosaurus* that John
Foster and I described a couple of years ago. Pretty sure I'll have more
to say about them in the future. For now it's enough that they've come
across such a vast gulf of time and given this stressed-out primate a
little perspective.

**Reference**

[Foster, J.R., and Wedel, M.J. 2014. *Haplocanthosaurus* (Saurischia:
Sauropoda) from the lower Morrison Formation (Upper Jurassic) near
Snowmass, Colorado. Volumina Jurassica 12(2): 197--210. DOI:
10.5604/17313708
.1130144](https://sauroposeidon.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/foster-and-wedel-2014-haplocanthosaurus-from-snowmass-colorado.pdf)


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I choose <i>Haplocanthosaurus</i>

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I've been writing for [*Sky &
Telescope*](http://www.skyandtelescope.com/), the American astronomy
magazine, for a year now. My first feature article was published last
December ([details
here](https://10minuteastronomy.wordpress.com/2015/10/31/my-article-in-the-december-sky-telescope/)),
my second came out this April
([ditto](https://10minuteastronomy.wordpress.com/2016/03/08/my-article-in-the-april-2016-sky-telescope/)),
and my latest is in the current (December 2016) issue, which should be
hitting newsstands this week. I've also been writing the "Binocular
Highlight" column since June.

My latest feature article, "Twelve Steps to Infinity", is my favorite
thing I've ever written about astronomy, and maybe my favorite thing
I've ever written, period.\* I'm posting about it here because the
concept should be interesting to all students of the past: the speed of
light is finite, so when we look out into space, we are also looking
back in time. We see the moon as it was 1.28 seconds ago, the sun as it
was 8.3 minutes ago, Jupiter anywhere from 33 minutes to over an hour
ago, depending on whether we're on the same side of the sun or not, and
Neptune after four hours -- at that distance, our 16-light-minute swing
around the sun hardly makes a difference. Most of the stars visible to
the naked eye are within 2000 light years, which is 2% or less of the
diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. With binoculars or a small telescope
you can track down numerous external galaxies and see them as they
appeared tens of millions of years ago. One of my favorite observations
is seeing the light of the quasar 3C 273, which started traveling 2.4
billion years ago, when our single-celled ancestors were gearing up for
the [Great Oxygenation
Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event). (If you'd
like to replicate that feat yourself, you can get a very capable,
"lifetime" telescope for a little over a hundred bucks. I recommend the
Orion SkyScanner 100 -- see
[this](https://10minuteastronomy.wordpress.com/2014/11/14/an-astronomy-wish-list-for-beginning-stargazers/)
and
[this](https://10minuteastronomy.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/skyscanning-in-utah-and-claremont/)
for more information.)

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Our place in the Milky Way, from a talk I put together on the same
subject.
:::

My new *Sky & Tel* article doesn't go nearly that far back -- in fact, I
don't even make it out of the Cenozoic. But the concept scales all the
way out, so if a particular event in Phanerozoic history is near to your
heart, there is probably a star, nebula, cluster, or galaxy whose light
left at the right time, which you could observe with binoculars or a
small telescope (although the distribution is gappy between half a
million and 30 million light years, where there just aren't that many
nearby galaxies). The
[Messier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Messier_objects) and
[Caldwell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldwell_catalogue) catalogs
are good places to start, and there are hordes of [online
resources](https://10minuteastronomy.wordpress.com/2016/07/23/binocular-highlights-what-im-rolling-with/)
(many funded by your tax dollars by way of NASA) you can use to find a
match. If I get really motivated I might post a table of easily-observed
celestial objects and their lookback times. In the meantime, if you have
a date in mind, leave it in a comment and I'll find something temporally
close for you to go look at.

Lots of people provided assistance and inspiration. Steve Sittig, who
runs the Hefner Observatory at the Webb Schools here in Claremont,
helped me refine the idea through numerous conversations, and did a
trial observing run with me last autumn. Fellow paleontologists Alan
Shabel and [Thierra Nalley](http://www.thierraknalley.info/) guided me
on hominid history (needless to say, any remaining errors are mine). My
editor at *Sky & Telescope*, S.N. Johnson-Roehr, made numerous small
improvements, and the S&T art department made the article even more
beautiful than I had hoped. Finally, the little plesiadapiforms at the
end of the piece are there thanks to [Pat
Holroyd](http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/about/profile.php?lastname=Holroyd&firstname=Pat),
who introduced me to them when I was at Berkeley. Many thanks, folks!

\* Other contenders: my favorite paleo thing is the [RLN
paper](https://svpow.com/2011/05/23/the-worlds-longest-cells-speculations-on-the-nervous-systems-of-sauropods/),
and my favorite thing I've written about myself is [this
essay](https://svpow.com/2014/04/22/five-conversations/). And that's
quite enough navel-gazing for one post!


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Rogue Scholar Beiträge

I choose Haplocanthosaurus

Lookback time – my new article in Sky & Telescope