The size of the Solar System (from the Sun to Pluto/Quaoar) has
been scaled down to fit within the borders of Maryland, and the
individual ‘planet’ caches have been spaced out accordingly. The
scale is 1 Astronomical Unit (average distance between Earth and
the Sun, or 93,000,000 miles) equivalent to approx 3.5 miles. The
tour starts with the nearest star to our planet: the Sun. If you do
the tour, mark the cache locations on a map of Maryland and see
just how vast the Solar System really is. This will hopefully give
you a feel for why it takes so long for spacecraft to travel from
Earth to anywhere in our Solar System.
Jupiter is by far the largest object in our Solar System next to
the Sun. At night it is one of the brighter objects in the sky
(surpassed by only Venus and the Moon). It boasts an incredible
number of satellites, four of which are easily visible in small
telescopes (hey, Galileo saw 'em back in 1609/1610!). You can see
cloudbands on Jupiter, and Jupiter is famous for its now-fading Red
Spot. The Hubble Space Telescope, with its ultraviolet camera
(STIS), has captured images of auroral activity on Jupiter
(
more info here). Finally, Jupiter was the focus of much world
attention during the summer of 1994 when Comet Shoemaker-Levy
slammed into it, causing disturbances in the atmosphere that not
only were able to be seen from Earth, but some of the impacts sites
in the clouds were the size of Earth! This impressive display of
destruction reaffirms the fact that we are here because of Jupiter
– Jupiter’s gravity has played a significant role in the
development of the rest of the Inner Solar System by sweeping away
debris that would otherwise continually rain down upon the inner
planets, causing even Earth with its protective atmosphere, to be
uninhabitable.
This micro is located in a HIGH muggle area (a "muggle-rich"
environment, you might say!). The actual hide should be only 1.5 to
2, depending on if you clue into this type of hide technique (most
cachers should have a rough idea), but I've set the difficulty to 3
because it might take you some patience in order to retrieve it
without being seen (there was one gentleman on the nearby phones
conversing away with someone on the other end, staring right at me
while I was trying to place it). If you exercise patience and
discretion, you should be able to snag this one in just a few
minutes after arrival. If you are hasty and blatant about it,
this'll likely get muggled, too. So take care.
This micro starts out with a small geocoin and a logsheet.
However, it is too small to host its own pen, so be sure to bring
your own writing instrument.
Note: if you intend on doing the Ice Planets multi-cache,
you will need the coordinate information on the inside of the cache
lid in order to locate the Quaoar portion of the Ice Planets cache.
Take extra paper to write down that information in the following
"formula":
Quaoar coords are N 39° US.JPN', W079° JN.SPU', where the
letters are the first letter of the planet cache where you will
find the necessary information (e.g., "J" is for the Jupiter gas
giant micro cache).