In the good old days, if your wristwatch showed you the correct time, it would’ve been just about enough. But today, it either has to tell you how many steps you’ve walked, or be able to make calls, or have a miniature night sky etched on it. The Astronomia Sky by Jacob & Co. fulfils just this latter need of the day, amongst other things.
Encased in an elaborate dome-shaped body, the watch is brimming with mechanics and royalty-level luxury. The base of the watch makes one revolution a year, mimicking a sidereal year, or the actual time it takes earth to revolve around the sun. On the edge of this dial is a month indicator for the perpetual calendar. At the watch’s centre is a small globe — built of lacquered titanium, of course — and to this is mounted the rest of the assembly. This assembly makes one revolution along the dial every twenty minutes — for the sake of accuracy.
With the globe acting as the trunk, there stem four branches; the first supports the hours and minutes dial. Yes, this does actually show the time. These are housed in a sub-dial, upon a differential system (a set of gears) to ensure the dial stays aligned to the correct angle, irrespective of the position of the rest of the arm.
Another arm holds up a triple-axis tourbillon. A tourbillon (French for ‘whirlwind’) is a rotating mechanical device that offsets the effect of gravity on a watch. They’re incredibly complex devices, cost a planet to make, and all my watches have worked fine without one, honestly. Yet another arm holds a separate seconds indicator, which spins on its own axis, and the final arm hosts a rotating globe, cut from orange sapphire.
To come back to that base, though, did we mention it had stars and constellations etched on it in 18k gold? And once a day, an oval — representing the horizon — orbits the dial, and the golden stars and constellations visible inside at any point are the ones currently overhead.
Now, why anybody needs a watch to do so many things is really a ‘your guess is as good as mine’ scenario. And the watch costs $580,000. Nope, no typos there. That’s half-a-million dollars. That’s half-a-million-dollars more than checking the time on your phone.
- Laquered titanium globe acts as a day/ night indicator
- Triple axis tourbillon
- ‘Orbital seconds’ wheel, resembling a satellite
- Stars and constellations, marked in 18k gold