A short walk from 4x4 trail.
“Hey Ralph!”
“What, Norton?”
“What’s that?”
“Uhhh, hommina, hommina, hommina…”
Haumea, our fifth dwarf planet, and 13th solar system planet (so far) has lead a life of controversy since her discovery: two groups of people discovered her independently; and one of those groups has access to photos dating back to 1955 of Haumea, but back then nobody realized she was there. Kinda like Galileo almost discovering Neptune, going so far as to draw pictures of Neptune into charts of Jupiter’s moons, and not seeing it; so is the case with Haumea.
Like some of our other dwarf planets (Eris and Makemake), and some other dwarf-planet wannabe’s (Quaoar and Orcus), Haumea was described and photographed in by The Mount Palomar/Caltech team consisting of Mike Brown, Chad Trujillo and David Rabinowitz on December 28, 2004. It was described as a Plutoid, and they were trying to determine its mass, when an announcement of the discovery came from a team lead by Jose Luis Ortiz Moreno from the Sierra Nevada Observatory in Spain in 2005, from photos they took in May of 2003. But, they didn’t look at those 2003 photos until after reading an abstract from the Palomar team in 2005…
Neither team has received official recognition as discoverers.
Named for the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth, (the Palomar team’s ‘official’ name. They originally called it “Santa”. The Spanish team calls it Ataecina, after the Iberian goddess of spring. Not the first planet to have multiple names: Uranus was once called Neptune in Britain and Germany. Weird, huh?) Haumea is the most lopsided planet in the solar system- even more squished than Jupiter! Possibly due to a very rapid spin; Haumea may have the shortest “day” in the solar system- only 3 hours or thereabouts. Unlike other KBO’s, Haumea is mostly rock, not ice.
Originally I thought this science series would be a power trail, but things being the way things are, these astronomy-themed caches are not very power-trail-ish. Instead, the first half can be found along Lake George’s Forest Rd 271. This is a 4x4 trail; please do not attempt with a regular car! Terrain and difficulty ratings are for people who drive to the cache locations; if you hike or mountain bike, of course the D/Ts will be different.
There will be a mixture of regular sized and small caches to start. We have a lot of peanut-butter jars to re purpose. The key is to have fun! And stay safe!
Views from the cache are part of the reason this series was placed here: granted, the first 2 or 3 in the series weren't much to look at. From here on in though, most of them have views.
Thanks, Sportslane, for rescuing this cache!
Homina homina Haumea! (astro-science series)
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