CACHE IS NOT AT POSTED COORDINATES
Please be careful in winter, watch for ice. There's room for some small items. Dino-swag for FTF.
Congrats to Sharpeye468 for being the first to solve, and congrats to muskie dave for being the FTF!
All throughout East Asia there are folk festivals based on the same tale. In China it's the Qixi festival. In Japan, it's called the Tanabata festival. There are many different ways to tell the tale, as one might expect with any old folklore. One version of the Japanese tale goes that Orihime (Vega) was a daughter of the Sky King. She worked very hard to weave beautiful clothes on the banks of the Heavenly River (Milky Way). But Orihime was sad that she never got to meet anyone and fall in love due to being so consumed with work. So the Sky King arranged for her to meet Kengyuu (Altair), who lived and worked on the other side of the river. When the two met they fell in love and married. However, in their passion they both stopped working. This angered the Sky King, who so loved Orihime's beautiful woven clothing. So in his anger he had them separated once again on differing sides of the river. Orihime became despondent, so the Sky King decided to allow the two to meet once a year, on the 7th day of the 7th moon. They cross upon a bridge of magpies. It is said if it rains during the festival, it is the tears of Orihime as the magpies could not come.
Vega is the brightest star in the constellation Lyra. It's thus been given the designation Alpha Lyrae. As Vega is north of the celestial plane (the path the Sun, Moon, and planets travel in our sky), it is visible to us almost all the time. Look for it at nightfall in the northeast in spring, high above our heads in summer, and northwest in autumn. Vega is the 2nd[g] brightest star in the northern half of the sky (after Arcturus), the 3rd[e] brightest we can see from our northern latitude, and the 5th brightest star visible overall from Earth.
It's a relatively close neighbour to us, only 25 light years away. This means it is the 6th closest star to Earth that you can see in the night sky without any optical aides. It also means the light that we see from it that reaches us tonight, left that star 25 years ago. So as of this writing, the light we see tonight left Vega when the Blue Jays were World Series champions, when Yugoslavia began to violently disintegrate, when Aladdin dominated the box office. Light travels approximately 300,000 kilometres every second, so in a year it will travel 9,500,000,000,000 kilometres. And going that fast, it takes the light from that star 25 years to reach us. Space is big yo. As an aside, this also means we're seeing Vega not as it is now, but as it was 25 years ago. But that's a story for a different time.
Vega is a distinctively white star with a blue tinge, so it's easy to distinguish from brilliantly orange Arcturus, the other really bright star in the northern half of the sky. It is spinning really quickly, about once every 12 hours (our Sun rotates once ever 28 days). This gives it a bulge along its equator. From our vantage point on Earth we are actually looking at it's pole, not the side. It burns at about 9400°C, about 3800°C hotter than our Sun. It's colour is actually a clue to its temperature. With stars, the hottest ones are always blue, then in descending order of warmth: white, yellow, orange, and red. Vega is an A0V type star. It's type, A, is the third hottest group of stars. But the A type (like the others) is subdivided, from 0 to 9[c], with 0 being the hottest. So Vega being an A0 type star means it's among the hottest of the third hottest grouping of stars. The V is the Roman numeral for 5[f]. This indicates its class for luminosity. Class V is for main sequence stars, meaning Vega isn't a giant, but roughly the same size as our Sun (which is a G2V star). It’s not exactly the same, as Vega is 4 million kilometres wide, and our Sun a comparatively paltry 1.4 million kilometres (for scale, our planet is 12,700 kilometres wide). It’s mass is also approximately 2.5 times that of our Sun. Its greater temperature combined with its greater mass means it’s burning through its fuel more rapidly than our Sun is, so it’s lifespan will be much shorter than our own star. It’s half a billion years old, and will only last another half billion years. Our Sun, meanwhile, is going to last about 10 billion years.
Vega, due to its convenience for European and North American astronomers, is one of the most studied stars in existence. It was the first star other than our Sun to be photographed. It was actually the star used as the measuring stick for stellar brightness. When the apparent magnitudes (how bright they look from Earth) of stars was being classified, astronomers needed a base from which to measure. They chose Vega, as it was thought it was stable in its energy outputs (it was only figured out much later that Vega is slightly variable, which means its output varies). Apparent magnitude is a logarithmic scale, and the bigger the number, the dimmer than Vega the star was. So a magnitude 0 star is as bright was Vega, a magnitude 1[a] is 2.5 times dimmer. Conversely, the numbers in the negative are brighter. A magnitude -1 is 2.5 times brighter than Vega. Our Sun is a magnitude -27. The human eye can only see to about magnitude 6[d] without optical aides. The Hubble Space Telescope can in visible light detect objects of a magnitude of 31.
Every night the stars appear to move except for one. The axis of the Earth’s rotation points at a star, and this start doesn’t appear to move. This star gets called the Pole Star, or the North Star (if in the North). Right now the Pole Star is Polaris. 12,000 years ago it was Vega. And in another 12,000 years it will again be Vega. This is because the direction that the axis points in changes with time, as the Earth wobbles. It wobbles in a circle, so the Pole Star changes every few thousand years. It takes about 25,000 years to complete a rotation.
Vega’s constellation in Western cultures is Lyra, the harp of the god Orpheus. This is why Vega is sometimes known as the Harp Star. Medieval Arabs saw it as a falling eagle, and termed it “an nesr al waqi”, the last word was transliterated and corrupted over time to become “Vega”. The Inuit called it Kingullialuk, “the big one behind”. The Sanskrit name for Vega is "Abhijit", which means victorious, and it is associated with Krishna, the god of love and tenderness.
In Inuit folklore there is a tale of a young boy (lliarjugaarjuk), who when visiting his grandmother (Ningiuq), was taunted by an old man (Uttuqalualuk). The old man, in his own youth, murdered his brother, and this was unknown to almost all. The grandmother knew, however, and told the young boy to taunt back at the old man that he knew the old man was a killer. One day the young boy mustered up the courage to yell that, and so the old man grabbed a knife and began to chase the young boy around an igloo. The grandmother saw the commotion and rushed to help. In the night sky, Kingullialuk (Vega) represents Ningiuq and is coming towards Sivulliik “the two in front” (Uttuqalualuk the old man, represented by Arcturus; and Iliarjugaarjuk the young boy, which is the star Muphrid).
If you were paying attention, you noticed that certain numbers were immediately followed by a bracketed letter. To get the coordinates to the cache location, replace the letter in the following with the number preceding the bracketed letter:
N 44 ag.cdg
W078 ag.egf