The Stars My Destination (1 CERES) Traditional Cache

“Millions for nonsense, not one cent for entropy!”

-Geoffery Fourmyle of Ceres (nee Gully Foyle) from Alfred
Bester’s “The Stars My Destination”

N.B.: Rohrerboy called and said that he saw two rattlesnakes on the way up to the cache late afternoon and heard a third. I saw and heard none when I dropped it there around 10AM. Of course, today was the first really hot day in a while and our friends may have been trying to run down a squirrel or two. I'm fairly new to placing caches, but not to the hills around here. Rattlesnakes are not uncommon in Shell Ridge and it may be that Rohrerboy was, in several senses of the word, just lucky today. In all events, please be careful. If I hear of any more, I'll try to get up there a cool evening and find a new spot for this cache.

Congratulations! You have reached Ceres, a geocache stop on your
way around a 45.6 million to one scale solar system model!

This solar system model has been conceived with the Sun being
set to a diameter of 100’ and located at the summit of Mt. Diablo.
If you were at Ceres, the sun appear to be the same size as a 100’
object floating immediately above the summit building. To give you
an additional point of reference the longest diagonal dimension of
the summit building is approximately 100.’

Ceres is the largest main-belt asteroid and it orbits the sun
every 4.6 years at distance of between 381 million and 445 million
kilometers (we’ve placed Ceres at 415 million kilometers, or about
5 ¾ miles or 9km from the summit of Mt. Diablo). Ceres is about 950
kilometers in diameter. I have enclosed a few small plastic balls
(from the Rokenbok toy system) which are just shy of 2cm in
diameter as a visual aid. They are just about the size of Ceres at
this scale.

On this scale, the asteroid belt is a band surrounding Mt Diablo
roughly bounded on the inside by Castle Rock Park and on the
outside by downtown Walnut Creek. Yet Ceres itself makes up about
32% of the mass of the entire asteroid belt; scoop the rest of it
up and you’ll have enough to make two more of these balls. Keep in
mind that, despite the images of Han Solo dodging asteroids and TIE
Fighters, our asteroid belt is made up – almost exclusively – of
nothing but empty space.

There is plenty of good information about Ceres on the internets
of course, but in putting together this cache, I became fond of
this website, entirely dedicated to this little bit of the heavens:
http://home.comcast.net/~eliws/ceres/

To date, all of mankind’s knowledge about Ceres has come through
the use of Earth- and space-based telescopes, but in 2007 NASA
launched the Dawn Mission which will travel first to the asteroid
Vesta arriving in 2011 and then to Ceres, arriving in 2015 (The
same year as the Far Horizons mission to Pluto arrives there – a
great year for Dwarf Planets!).

At the 45.6 million to one scale:

• Mercury is 4.2” (106mm) in diameter, and is 4163 feet (1268
meters) from the summit.

• Venus is 10.4” (265mm) in diameter, and is 7767 feet (2367
meters) from the summit.

• Earth is 11” (279 mm) in diameter, and is 10,745 feet (3275
meters) from the summit.

• Mars is 5.8” (148 mm) in diameter, and is 16,368 feet (4989
meters) from the summit, just east of Alamo or at the southern end
of Mitchell Canyon Road in Clayton.

• Jupiter is just over 10’ (3.06 m) in diameter, and is 10.6
miles (17 kilometers) from the summit, just west of the Pleasant
Hill Road exit on Highway 24. (This cache is in place as GC1QCC9 –
All These Worlds Are Yours).

• Saturn is 8’ 5” (2.55m) in diameter, and is 19.4 miles (31.2
kilometers) from the summit, about the distance to El Cerrito or a
bit north of the Del Valle Reservoir south of Pleasanton.

• Uranus is 3’ 4” (1.03m) in diameter, and 39 miles (62.8
kilometers) from the summit, about the distance to Dixon, Lodi or
Mt. Hamilton.

• Neptune is 3’ 3” (0.99m) in diameter, and 61.2 miles (98.5
kilometers) from the summit, about the distance to the Southeast
Farallon /Seal Rock, Carmichael or Sebastopol.

• Pluto is just 2” (50mm) in diameter, and 80 miles (129.5
kilometers) from the summit, about the distance to Newcastle (just
west of Auburn), Jamestown (on Highway 49) or the southern end of
Clear Lake.

• Voyager 1, launched in 1977 and the man-made object furthest
from the Sun, would be 221 miles away, between Lake Shasta and
Dunsmuir or

• Alpha Centauri, the star system closest to the Sun, is
approximately 550,000 miles from here, or more than twice the
distance from the Earth to the Moon.

• The Center of the Galaxy is approximately 3.5 billion miles
away, about the actual distance to Pluto.

• The Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest galaxy, would be 0.05 actual
light years (280 billion miles) away.

• The edge of the observable universe is about 285 actual light
years away (the star Spica is 220 light years distant).

• The speed of light, approximately 186,000 miles (300,000
kilometers) per second, works out to be about 6.56 m/s or 21.3 fps,
or about 15 miles per hour. Therefore, freeway speeds violate all
known laws of physics. So, on your way back spool up your FTL
drive, hyperdrive, jump drive, skip drive, infinite improbability
drive, KK Field, stutterwarp drive or (if you absolutely must) warp
drive, and recall that even at five times light-speed, there’s a
whole lot of black between here and there.

Please note that this series of geocaches will be rolled out
over the next few months. It is designed to give you a sense of
just how big the Solar System really is. There will eventually be
caches for all nine planets and, with the main belt of asteroids
filling an arc through Concord, Walnut Creek, Danville and into
Tassajara Valley, plenty more places beyond to add to the
theme.

Notes on the Cache itself:

The approach is probably best from the W or NW. It's steeper,
but the brush is a lot thinner than from my approach from the SE. There are obvious game trails, but
the brush hides a lot of chipmunk holes, so watch your step.

At GZ - I took 20 samples in clear sky, so GZ should be dead center
- the cache is what's probably the most-obvious hiding place.

The cache itself is a 6x8” lock-and-lock.

Its initial contents, apart from the above description of the
solar system model, the log book, and the boiler plate were:

2 Soviet-era space-themed postcards

1 wind-up Robot

1 embroidered Skylab I mission patch

1 STS-26 mission emblem pin

1 space-themed pencil (feel free to take that in trade)

1 bag of glow-in-the-dark plastic star thingies

1 small flash light thingy

several Rokenbok balls meant for use as scale models of Ceres,

Congratulations to Jedi2543 for the FTF!