For some reason, my last topic was closed down; marked as spam. Well, this is a giveaway. Stating that clearly here.

A few ground rules:
I. I want you to fail.
II. I'll probably only give hints if there are no entries.
III. www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/?????
IV. Giveaway starts at 5 PM CST, Friday, Feb. 10 and ends 5 PM CST, Friday, Feb. 17. Solutions will be posted shortly afterwards.
V. Proof for those non-believers.

Hints:
a) We follow the right-hand rule in America. Using your right hand determines positive and negative directions. North is positive, south is negative. East is positive, West is negative
b) Cancer and Capricorn have this in common. Line of LATITUDE
c) There's an entire universe to search. Wikisky link
d) It's always in the middle of the box. Default Wikisky coordinates place a box around the object

  1. 7:03:12.0 AM, 8°20'S, 35°16'E
  2. 11:18:55.9 AM, 13°05′N, 44°16'E
  3. d3
  4. f4
  5. 1:12:55.3 PM, 18°10′N, 89°16'W

Edit - separated hints from rules, for clarity.

In honor of my first win, I hid a second giveaway on this thread. It will end at 5 PM CST, Monday, Feb. 20. The game is Greed Corp.

Solutions:
1, 2, and 5 are star coordinates. The longitude is added to throw you off.
1 becomes 7h 03m 12.0s, -8°20'. Plugging those coordinates into the Wikisky link gives you the location of a Messier number.
The Messier numbers decode through hex to become the url.
3 and 4 are just replaced by their respective alphabetical or numerical equivalent. d becomes 4, 3 becomes c. Hence d3 = 4c, f4 = 6d. These are also decoded through hex.

Giveaway url

13 years ago*

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i suck at these coordinates puzzle types...

13 years ago
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I must say its a great challenge, im a little sad its aparently outside my knowledge base, but i spent a good hour or two trying to figure it out, great fun!

13 years ago
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I'll certainly post solutions when the giveaway's over. Thanks for trying it out!

13 years ago
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I want to give more hints, but I think it'd be unfair to the 1 guy that solved it so far :(

13 years ago
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Congrats to that one guy.

13 years ago
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Put up a proving screenshot.

13 years ago
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Added another giveaway in honor of my first win!

13 years ago
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now if only I could figure out what to do with 3 and 4

13 years ago
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Extra hint: the hints only apply to 1, 2, and 5.

13 years ago
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Floppers.

13 years ago
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meh, had 1,2,5 before any hints, hard to hide RA coords when you use seconds with decimals, should have rounded them ^^

also I thought hints were supposed to help not hinder. I thought since we were dealing with astronomy that you were referring to the fact they were both constellations. So I was just using the first letter of each constellation that the Messier objects were in :x

13 years ago
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Hah, funny enough, I didn't plan out the Cancer/Capricorn thing as being confusing. Afterwards, I thought, "Oh, they might get it confused with constellations...that's awesome!" So I kept it. I'm glad someone else out there is able to recognize RA and Dec coordinates though. This may have been too specific of a subject, but I was hoping to introduce people to something they normally wouldn't deal with.

13 years ago
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Finding the messier numbers was kinda straightforward (after the hint about the universe especially, I used wikipedia only though). I knew you like hex/binary/ascii encryption, but then I stuck on the letter/number replacement after trying whatever popped in my mind. Nice and clever by the way, thanks anyway!

13 years ago
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Closed 13 years ago by yupignome.