Orion - Alnilam Mystery Cache

Orion (The Hunter) is surely the most appropriate constellation for Geocaching. This series plots the shape of the main stars of Orion in the downland between Blackcap and Denton. You do not need to visit the published locations that make up the constellation. Use the celestial coordinates of each star to construct the actual locations of the caches. Each one is different. The actual caches co-ordinates are all within (often well within) 800m of the published co-ordinates. You can collect all these caches in a single walk, with some excursions off public footpaths onto small unmarked paths. You only need to do anything resembling crashing through undergrowth as you get close to some of the GZs. Since I planned this series a new fence has been erected which may cause some annoying backtracking. A good sequence to do these in, without the need to climb any fences, would be Rig-Hat-Mint-Neb-Miz-Alnm-Bell-Meis-Alnk-Bete-Sai – or the reverse.

Finding celestial co-ordinates for these stars should be easy enough, but be advised that different sky sites give varying numbers of decimal places. Beware of rounding issues. I have tried to keep the most critical substitutions unambiguous, and there’s always the geochecker to make sure you are on the right track.

The buckle on Orions belt. A Blue Supergiant 1300 light years away. It gives out 400,000 times more light than the sun, but much of it is UV, so it is not as bright as Rigel. It loses material 20 million times faster than the sun, so will go Supernova in about 1 million years. The name derrives from the Arabic word meaning string of pearls.

I used this star as point-zero to plan the exact positionning of the published caches. In this case you should find the actual cache is very close to the published co-ordinates.

You can check your answer for the cache location on Geochecker.com.