Five planets in the sky tonight

On the north western horizon at sunset: a bright Venus. Then a tiny Mercury, Jupiter, and across to the east to Mars and Saturn.

Awesome. Naked eye, from the back yard, 8 km from the CBD. Beautiful clear night and not too cold either.

Then we turned our eyes to something much closer and smaller.



My fountain pen nib. It's been languishing in a drawer and when I decided to get it out and use it, gosh, it didn't write so well. Then  we discovered the concept of nib smoothing (sanding the nib basically), but that didn't help much. So we washed it and voila! She writes real good again.

Mish is inspecting the corroded gold plate with her jeweller's magnifier. Wow. Great close up.

And this is her on Qantas flying into Wellington last Saturday at midnight.