Celestial Seasoning Mystery Cache
Hidden : 4/9/2004
Difficulty:
4.5 out of 5
Terrain:
2 out of 5

Size: Size: regular (regular)

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Geocache Description:


The posted coordinates are not the cache location. The coordinates will take you to the parking lot of a restaurant near my house which unfortunately caught fire right before Christmas 2004. Hopefully they will rebuild!    You cannot locate the cache without advance preparation as it requires solving a problem in celestial navigation.

Before the advent of GPS and other electronic navigation aids, and after the development of the chronometer by John Harrison, navigators on the open sea were able to determine their position by the use of celestial navigation using a sextant and tables of positions of celestial objects (sun, moon, stars, planets). While GPS has replaced the sextant as a primary navigation tool at sea, the possibility of a power failure means that the wise mariner retains his sextant and accurate watch.

At sea, celestial navigation needs only be accurate to a matter of a few miles. One spot of the ocean looks pretty much like any other, and land can be sighted from a greater distance than typical errors involved in the use of sextant and watch. For geocaching purposes, I have constructed a problem in determining a location from a sextant reading and an accurate time. This is all the information that is needed.

Somewhere in the United States I took a sextant sight of the sun at 17:57:56 GMT on January 1, 2004 when the sun reached its absolute highest point in the sky that day at my location.   My corrected sextant reading was 29 degrees, 52.5 minutes.

From the above information you should be able to compute a latitude and longitude close to the large structure on which the sight was taken. The structure is named for an individual. Find the year of his birth ABCD and year of his death EFGH, plus the number of a nearby highway IJ, and plug the digits into the following cache coordinates.

  3G A2.2IJ N   BH E2.F0D W



I have now posted a series of encrypted log entries (spoilers) to aid in solutions.

For anyone conversant with celestial, this problem should be straightforward.   For others, it will provide a chance to learn the principles of navigating by reference to the heavens.

If this cache draws significant interest, I plan to place others with a celestial navigation theme and featuring other techniques for determining a position. The back cover of the logbook will contain information necessary to solve a subsequent cache, so be sure to record this info after your find.

Initial cache contents include a number of small and useful items obtained from a Home Depot store. The container is large enough for small travel bugs.

The park is open daily from 8:00am to dark. Do not hunt after hours.

Since this cache is found very infrequently, please do not place travel bugs or other trackables here.

Additional Hints (No hints available.)



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