This park has two caches now, so be sure to visit MissyRileigh's Goin' Fishin' cache while you're nearby!
To borrow from Victor Kiam's old Remington shaver ads, "I liked the park so much, I placed a cache!".
Betelgeuse is a red supergiant star, about 10,000 times the size of the sun.
The diameter of the star is about 650 times the diameter of the sun. The star fluctuates irregularly in brightness over a period of years and has been seen to vary by up to a factor of two in luminosity. Betelgeuse is also pulsates irregularly in size. The diameter of the star may vary as much as 60%.
If the sun were replaced by Betelgeuse, the surface of the star might stretch out beyond the asteroid belt. The planets out to the orbit of Mars would be engulfed by the star.
Betelgeuse is a massive star as well. It may contain as much as 20 times the mass of the sun. Because of its large mass, Betelgeuse is a star that will run through its life history fairly quickly. The star has already consumed the bulk of its hydrogen fuel in the core and is on the way to stellar graveyard. Betelgeuse is losing mass at reasonably rapid rate. It is estimated that within a few hundred thousand years Betelgeuse will eject about one solar mass of material.
I think the name is odd. How do you get 'beetle juice' out of those letters?!
Actually, the cache is named for Ford Prefect, the hitchiker not the car.
Ford Prefect is a main character in Douglas Adams' Hitchker's Guide to the Galaxy series of novels.
If you haven't read them yet, they are very enjoyable, humourous, quick reads.
"Ford is not from Guildford, as he usually claims. He actualy comes from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse. He came to Earth for a week and got stuck there for fifteen years. His minimal research told him that Ford Prefect would be a nicely inconspicuous name."
HackAttack was the first to find and log this cache and enters the
9Key Hall of Fame!