Please wear suitable footwear for walking off-road.
Please do not do at night, as we don't want to worry the remote residents.
There are toilets and a picnic area at the base of the dam on the lower road.
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.
Uranus was discovered by the German- English astronomer William Herschel in 1781 who lived in Bath. Like Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus is a gas giant and is similar in size to Neptune, that is, four times larger than Earth.
Uranus is a little different, unlike all the other planets and most of the moons in our Solar System, Uranus spins on its side and one of the three that spins 'backwards'. It is believed that long ago a very large object smashed into this planet and the crash was so powerful that it completely changed the direction of Uranus's planetary rotation.
Like Saturn, the thick atmosphere of Uranus is made up of methane, hydrogen and helium. But Uranus is an extremely cold planet, it has been called the "ice giant". It is believed that Uranus is made up of rock and ice and has a large rocky core.
Uranus has a series of faint rings, with a system of 15 known satellites, again some are 'shepherd satellites' which help hold the rings together.
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 Uranus is 19.2 miles away from Sol, where we've brought you into the beautiful Elan Valley Estate which became WALES' FIRST INTERNATIONAL DARK SKY PARK ON JULY 17TH 2015 AND THE FIRST PARK IN THE WORLD THAT IS PRIVATELY OWNED BUT PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE. The IDA Dark Sky Park application was processed by DIESEL & WYVERN for the Estate!! :D
You may also like to find our 'Hole Stone View' cache GC3PG4J.
We would like to give grateful thanks to the Elan Valley Trust and Dwr Cymru Welsh Water for their kind permission to allow us to place this cache on their land.
Please see www.elanvalley.org.uk for further information about the Elan Valley and events held during the year ...including Astronomy!
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
We hope you enjoy our Welsh Solar System series...D&W