In-depth understanding of the beautiful and meaningless madness of high-precision moon phase watches

The moon pun is here.

Jaeger-LeCoultre Perpetual Calendar Quadriptyque with displays of rendezvous, anomalous and dragon lunar cycles. The phases of the moon are accurate to an error of one day in 1,111 years.

If you have a little romance in your soul, the moon phase complication is easy to be loved. This is one of the oldest complex functions in horology-in fact, you can say that it predates real mechanical watchmaking and watchmaking, because it appeared in the two thousand-year-old mechanical computer called Antikythera Mechanism middle.

Once upon a time, moon phases were as useful as any other complication. It’s easy to forget how much the moonlight had before the invention of artificial lights-this may sound obvious, but the night was once dark, and because of the light pollution caused by towns and cities, most of us would never experience it.

Today, the moon phase, like mechanical watchmaking itself, is an anachronism—in fact, it is an anachronism. However, as George Daniels wrote about remontoire in Watchmaking, “the fact that this mechanism is completely unnecessary only adds to its charm.”

Logically, the moon phase is expected to show the current moon phase. The time required for the moon to return to a specific phase (such as a new moon) is called a synodic moon, with an average of 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, and 2.8 seconds (the actual length may vary) due to the eccentricity of the moon’s orbit, the most in any given month It can be reduced by 7 hours, but the average value is accurate). This is 29.530589 days (decimal). The standard moon phase complication rounds it to 29.5 days by using a 59-tooth moon phase wheel that advances once a day, but this means that the display will be closed for a full day in about two and a half years.

In fact, this may only make sense if you are a werewolf, but the pursuit of precision for your own sake is an important part of making watchmaking fun. For decades, independent and other watch brands have been pursuing improvements. The accuracy of the moon phase display.

IWC fired the first shot. In the 1980s, Kurt Klaus, the company’s head movement manufacturer, developed a high-precision moon phase display when designing a perpetual calendar/chronograph movement for Da Vinci. He calculated that a gear train would shut down one day every 122 years. IWC’s current perpetual calendar is accurate to one day every 577.5 years.

You would expect a high-precision moon phase from a German brand, and you are right-A. Lange & Söhne launched the Lange 1 Moonphase as early as 2002, with an accuracy of one day in 122 years. However, they launched a limited edition 1815 Emil Lange moon phase watch in 1999, and they did a better job than this. This is made of a series of 150 platinum and another 250 rose gold, and its moon phase display is accurate to a day in 1058, which is really amazing. The Richard Lange Perpetual Calendar Terraluna is also accurate to a day of 1,058; it also has the most beautiful example of tellurium (an astronomical complication that shows the relative positions of the earth, moon, and sun) I have ever seen.

At this point, things start to get more and more – or I should say, they will gradually increase until they don’t. It is at this point that independent watchmakers really start to emerge-I don’t know why, maybe because they are more inclined to pursue art for the sake of art, rather than at least partly to increase the shares of a listed company (although you The company cannot be blamed for operating itself like a company).

According to Strehler and confirmed by well-wishers in the Guinness Book of World Records, this particular watch can be accurate to a deviation of 2.045 million years per day. Long ago, modern humans did not exist-in fact, the early members of the human genus have just begun to leave Africa and come to an unsuspecting planet. Now, this watch will tell you when the next full moon will be-it is indeed a reassuring timepiece for immortal beasts and those who love them. Online cheap watch