On the map below you will see our Solar System Series follows a rough line north to south along the Cambrian Mountains of Mid Wales and covers 40 miles using 1 mile to 1 astronomical unit, which itself equals 93 million miles. When finding the caches you will also notice we have chosen cache sizes relative to the size of the planets etc.
The picture below shows the relative size and positions of the objects in our series, which starts with Sol near Dylife then travels in a southerly direction nearly 40 miles to end with Pluto near Llanwrda just south-west of Llandovery.
There are 15 caches in all, as we have included the first four Asteroids to be discovered and a famous Comet. We have also included Pluto, as most people have grown up learning that Pluto was a planet, though now demoted to dwarf planet status.
There are millions of asteroids and like most other Small Solar System Bodies, asteroids are thought to be the often shattered remnants of planetesimals, bodies within the young Sun’s solar nebula that never grew large enough to become planets. A large majority of known asteroids orbit in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
Ceres was the first asteroid to be discovered just after midnight on January 1st, 1801 by the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi, who observing from Sicily, named it Ceres, after Sicily's patron goddess.
Ceres is by far the largest of the asteroids, comprising more than a third of the total mass of the main asteroid belt. Ceres is also the smallest of the dwarf planets.
In 2014...WATER DETECTED ON DWARF PLANET CERES...
The spacecraft called Dawn, which has spent more than a year orbiting the large asteroid Vesta, is now on its way to Ceres, where it is scheduled to arrive in the spring of 2015.
For more than a century, Ceres was known as the largest asteroid in the Solar System, but in 2006 the International Astronomical Union, the governing organization responsible for naming planetary objects, re-classified it as a 'dwarf planet' because of its large size...it is roughly 950 km in diameter. (But it is still an asteroid, for all that!)
When it was discovered in 1801, astronomers thought that it was a planet orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Later, other cosmic bodies with similar orbits were found, marking the discovery of the Solar System's main belt of asteroids.
Scientists think that Ceres contains rock in its interior, with a thick mantle of ice that, if melted, would amount to more fresh water than exists on the Earth. The materials making up Ceres probably date from the first few million years of the Solar System's existence and accumulated before the planets formed.
Scientists using the Herschel infrared space observatory have recently detected water vapour on Ceres. It appears that plumes of water vapour shoot up when portions of its icy surface warm slightly.
Until now, ice had been thought to exist on Ceres but had not been detected conclusively. Herschel did not see water vapour every time it looked: although it observed water vapour four different times, on one occasion there was no such signature. Scientists think that, when Ceres is in the part of its orbit that is closest to the Sun, some of its icy surface becomes warm enough to cause water vapour to escape in plumes at a rate of about 6 kilograms per second, while in the colder part of its orbit no water escapes. The strength of the signal also varied over hours, weeks and months, because of the water vapour plumes rotating in and out of Herschel's view as Ceres spun on its axis. That enabled the scientists to localize the sources of water to two dark spots on the surface of Ceres, previously seen by the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes. The dark spots might be more likely to outgas because dark material absorbs heat better than light material.
When Dawn arrives, we can hope to learn a lot more.
When deciding where to place our Solar System series we thought of using the Cambrian Mountain Ridge as a guideline to give Geocachers a scenic route and to give suitable cache sites with interest. We chose to start the series with Sol at it's northern end near the Star Inn because of the connection... Sol being our nearest 'star'.
Here Ceres should be 2.80 miles from Sol, but here with three of the Asteroids in this series we have taken a slight liberty with the 'distance' and relocated them in an area we discovered in part of the Hafren Forest with all it's beautiful woodland flora and fauna. At this point, you are walking along part of Glyndwr's Way.
We would like to thank the NRW-Forestry Commission for giving us permission to place these caches in the Hafren Forest
We hope you enjoy our Welsh Solar System series...D&W
If you are interested in Astronomy here in the Dark Skies of the Cambrian Mountains then check out our Mid Wales Astronomy fb page ... www.facebook.com/midwalesastronomy and you are welcome to join us at Newtown Astronomy Society who have monthly meetings from September to June... www.facebook.com/groups/1412459148966189