This cache is called Moonlight Madness because it
was set up at about 10 PM in the light of the moon by my nephew and
me while laughing and trying not to stumble over this and that. [He
asked me to plant the cache because he wants to watch people look
for it. He lives in the house across the road.] The image below was
taken in moonlight. Because the camera shutter was open for only 15
seconds I had to wildly spell the word cache and make an arrow
before the time ran out. I light I used was the bright LED light on
my keychain. We had a good time to say the least. The moon was
bright, hence the ability to see the terrain. The arrow points at
the location of the cache. It’ll be up to you to find it, given
only the coords for where to park and which direction and distance
the cache is from there. Again, the picture below was taken in the
light of a nearly full moon.
To see some of my other night photos, one of which shows a
comparison of moonlight and sunlight go to my
Gordy Was Here cache and have a look
at the pictures. The specific one that compares moonlight on a
windless night (the bottom picture) and daylight (the top picture)
is
here.
In the moonlight pictures I took near my Gordy Was Here
cache in Wisconsin stars are visible in the original images. That
makes them distinctly different from a daylight shot. The only
problem I had with the moonlight images is that I didn’t have a
tripod with me. I tried to hold the camera on top of something like
a fence post but still managed to move it a tiny bit during the
long exposures. I can see that the stars trails are wiggly. The
two-minute exposure that I used was sufficient to allow the stars
near the “celestial equator” to trail significantly. At the
Moonlight Madness cache we used a 15 second exposure cuz that’s all
the longer that camera would go. I brightened up the image further
with the help of my computer.
The reason I don’t appear in the pictures is because I was
always moving (I’m blurred out) and was wearing dark clothing. Once
when I was taking a 10 second exposure of a wild flower in deep
woods, a spider walked through the image. It didn’t even show up
though because it smeared so much. My nature pictures of wild
flowers are unique because I use a very small aperture in the lens
for added depth of field (focus). However, that in turn forces me
to use relatively long exposures. As you might well imagine the
wind is like a demon that is a constant annoyance when I’m out
taking multiple second exposures. I have learned how to deal with
it and rarely get a blurred shot. I have even had the wind start up
and move a flower a bit during the last part, maybe 10%, of an
exposure yet the picture still looks as clear as a bell.
The Garrity Micro Led Key Chain Light that I used to
trace the letters with is pictured
here. I got it for just under $5.00
at an automotive supply store.
The land owner does not mind if all that you do is go looking
for this cache and stay on the farm lane as much as you can.
Inside the ammo can to start with is a miniature auto tuning FM
radio (thanks goes to Welch for that), a roll of Scotch Tape, a
mini bouncy ball, a rubber hope bracelet, a pair of spy kids 3D
glasses (ask me about the URLs to go to see wonderful 3D on the
net), a Diet Mountain Dew sticker, fossils (see where I got them
here .) a few rubber bands, and a
piece of petrified wood. Needless to say the bottle is kind-a
packed full to start with.
The coordinates lead you to a place that is the opening to a
field: park there. It’s in the circle in
this aerial image, an image that’s a
little outdated. There is one more house nearby now. Walk along the
fence lines as indicated by the yellow line. The cache is 0.13
miles SW of the parking spot.
The area is nothing fancy at all but may be a sinkhole by the
looks of it. It can be a bit treacherous to walk across so be
careful. As long as you stay away from any debris you should be OK.
The cache is not in the hole either.
When my nephew picked up a rock and handed it to me to help
wedge the cache into place I looked at it to see if it contained
any fossils and boy did it! The limestone in this area is loaded
with crinoids, corals and more. I am wondering if it’s the same
formation that was exposed so well in Coralville when the historic
1993 floods surged over the emergency spillway at the Coralville
Lake on the Iowa River and eroded a 15 foot deep channel into the
underlying bedrock deposits. A link that discusses that fossil
location can be found
here . Please don’t take the rocks that I have
supporting the cache. I’d like others to get to see the fossils
too. There may be some others near by.
Good luck in finding it. It should be pretty easy.