Starship Asterisk*

Astronomy Picture of the Day: The Best Thing from NASA Since the Moonshot

From Esquire.com's The Daily Endorsement:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/endorsemen ... ive-051409

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Occasionally I run into items on the web that mention APOD. Usually I soon lose them. So maybe I should record them. Here is one now. If anyone knows of others, please do post them. They may be useful one day in justifying APOD's existence!

- RJN

Hey Bob, did you know about this?

http://www.google.com/alerts

If you put a Google alert for "APOD" then Google will send you an email every time its crawler picks up a new mention of it with a link to the website. It works really well. I've used it for "geckzilla" for a long time now to find out when people are mentioning me or my website. It's good about not spamming me with useless things. For instance, it never tells me about any new posts I make on this forum.

There's also Webmaster Tools.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

You just add a file with a randomly generated key to the root of your website so it knows you own it and then it will let you see who links to you the most and using what words. Useful, but quite a bit more technical.

Nasa, which posted the image on its Astronomy Picture of the Day website today, says, 'The green auroral band occurred fortuitously about 100 kilometers above the erupting lava. Is Earth the Solar System's only planet with both auroras and volcanos?'

The answer, by the way, is believed to be yes (within the Solar System). Jupiter and Saturn both have auroras, but no volcanoes. Uranus and Neptune have weaker auroras.

Where: Daily Mail
Found: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... lcano.html
Relevant APOD: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120708.html

Any thoughts on whether they answered the question correctly?

RJN wrote:Any thoughts on whether they answered the question correctly?

I'd give a qualified no (or a qualified yes).

Both Venus and Mars have volcanoes, and both have auroras. What neither apparently have are active volcanoes... although that isn't certain for Venus, and it's possible that Mars remains tectonically active enough to produce a new volcano.