CACHE IS NOT AT THE POSTED COORDINATES! PLEASE DO NOT GO THERE!
Welcome to the series THROUGH THE TELLESCOPE LENS! I have assorted twenty mystery caches in the Southeast Lake County area of various puzzle difficulties. This series is in memorial of the great 4xkrat who tragically left us recently. We shared three loves: astronomy, puzzles, and caching. In his honor, I have decided to combine the three things he loved into a winter break project.
(To FTF hunters: I give considerable leeway towards early puzzlers. Feel free to ask me any questions if there seems to be errors or confounding stages. There is a lot of snow pileup, and I'm more than willing to approximate how winter friendly a hide if you ask me. I will also be partially available on Saturday to VISIT some of the hides. Good luck!)
N 42° 14.0(first)′ W 87° 57.(second)′
This puzzle centers on two asteroids.
The first is asteroid is named Klio, discovered in 1865 by Robert Luther. According to the IAU Minor Planet Center, it takes 3.63 years to orbit the Sun. The website's orbit sketch gives a good visualization on how weird the astroid's orbit is compared to the eight planets.
The second asteroid is named Alleghania, discovered in 1900 by M. F. Wolf and A. Schwassmann. I find this asteroid interesting because while most asteroids are named after people or dieties, this asteroid is named after a city (now part of Pittsburgh), which is in turn named after the Allegheny river. The Dictionary of Minor Planet Names quotes that Allegheny was chosen for the name in honor of the optician John A. Bashear, who gave Wolf a lens he described as "excellent".