This is the start of two new series (as of 2007) of caches: The Solar System Tour and The Interstellar Series. Both of which, at different scales, will stretch their way across Maryland. This will hopefully give you not only an idea of how far things are in our little Solar System, but at a different scale, just how far the nearest stars are to us. Along your interplanetary and/or interstellar journey(s) you will hopefully learn some interesting tidbits about the objects represented by these caches.
For The Solar System Tour series, our Solar System has been scaled down to fit within the borders of Maryland, and individual planet caches have been spaced out accordingly. The scale is 1 Astronomical Unit (AU; the average distance between the Earth and the Sun, or ~93,000,000 miles) is equivalent to 1 mile. At THIS scale the nearest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri, at a distance of 4.242 light years, would be 268,268.32 miles from here (that’s further than the Moon is to Earth!). The Solar System tour starts with the nearest star to our fair planet: the Sun. If you do the full tour (and you could conceivably do so in a bonzo day – or more probably over a weekend), mark the cache locations on a map of Maryland and see just how vast the Solar System really is! This will hopefully give you a feel for why it takes so long for spacecraft, moving at tens of thousands of miles an hour, to travel from Earth to anywhere in our Solar System.
To give you an idea of what is before you, here is a list of the Sun-Solar System Object distances listed in AUs (you can do the conversions) :
- Sun – 0 AU (duh)
- Mercury – 0.4 AU
- Venus – 0.7 AU
- Earth – 1 AU
- Mars – 1.5 AU
- Asteroid Belt – 2.3-3.3 AU
- Jupiter – 5.2 AU
- Saturn – 9.5 AU
- Uranus – 19.2 AU
- Neptune – 30.1 AU
- Kuiper Belt – 30-48 AU
- Oort Cloud – 50-100,000 AU (very fuzzy boundaries)
- Terminator Shock – 75-90 AU
- Heliopause – 80-100 AU
For The Interstellar Series, I have taken select stars in the globe of our stellar “neighborhood”, abstracted the area down to a 2-dimensional region, and scaled the distances to fit within the borders of Maryland. The interstellar caches have been spaced out accordingly> The scale for this series is 1 light-year (the distance a photon of light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, to go in one nominal Earth year) is equivalent to 1 mile. At this scale, the nearest stars to our Sun are going to be 4.2-4.3 miles away from the cache. As above, as you travel from star cache to star cache, mark their respective positions on a map of Maryland to see just how far some of these stars are! The famous Eagle Nebula photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 would, at this scale, be over 7,000 miles away.
Note: the relative direction and positions from our Sun and with respect to each other was not factored into the placing of these stellar caches. Therefore a true ‘map’ of our stellar neighborhood is not represented. Only the distance from our Sun to the individual stars. For a 2D jpg map of our solar neighborhood, go here.
To give you an idea of how far some of these stars are from us, here is a small list of some of the brighter stars you can see in the night sky.
- Alpha Centauri – 4.3 ly (you have to be in the Southern Hemisphere to see these, though)
- Beta Centauri – 525 ly (located next to Alpha Centauri in the sky)
- Sirius – 8.7 ly (brightest star in the night sky, very prominent during the winter evening months)
- Altair – 16.8 ly
- Vega – 25.3 ly
- Betelgeuse – 427.3 ly
- Antares – 603.7 ly
- Rigel – 772.5 ly
- Deneb – 3227.7 ly
- Polaris – 431.2 ly (the North Star; not really all that bright, actually)
Now, our Sun is an everyday, ordinary average yellow dwarf star of type dG2V. The ‘d’ is for ‘dwarf’, the ‘V’ indicates that it is a Main Sequence star (rather than a Giant), and the ‘G’ designation is the spectral type (yellow). The ‘2’ indicates a more refined spectral type subset (that runs from 0 – 9). Now, despite the fact our Sun is “average”, it is quite a fascinating little star to study. The average surface temperature on the Sun is about 6,000 degrees Kelvin (or about 10,000 degrees Farenheit). And while considered a ‘dwarf’ in the stellar community, it is quite sizeable, having a diameter over 100 times that of Earth, and having 333,000 times the mass of Earth. It has flares, prominences, and sunspots galore. If you ever have the opportunity to view the sun through a telescope with a hydrogen alpha filter, by all means do so! You will not regret the treat your eyes will behold.
The cache is a camo’d magnetic key holder. For the seasoned cacher, it will be pretty obvious the location of the hide. Pretty much a cache-n-dash.