Luna Magna by Arnold & Son
And a moon phase indicator in a shape of a huge 3D moon.
Arnold & Son has categorized its watches in three different families of products; the world time one with watches such as the Globetrotter, a watch introduced a few years back and clearly recognizable with this large map of the northern hemisphere held on this large arch going through the entire dial, then we have the Chronometry family with timepieces with a focus on the chronometrical dimension of these watches, yes that wasn’t too difficult to figure out and you have various examples fitting this such as the Time Pyramid Tourbillon with its original double power reserve indicator and off-centred hour and minute dial and finally, the Astronomy family and this is what we will focus on now.
The Luna Magna comes in a 44mm red gold case and the first rapid impression is one of pretty classical watchmaking but then you suddenly see something quite unusual at 6 o’clock with this really big bi-colour 12mm in diameter marble and this is actually your moon phase indicator. It is made of two separate hemispheres, one made out of aventurine glass and matching the surrounding dial and the second one is white marble.
From these raw materials, they are machined using CNC’s to achieve this domed shape and they are then assembled to form a single sphere and held in place on a vertical axis with only a small opening around it. 12mm is naturally quite big, but you don’t have a feeling of being oversized, the watch remains quite thin and well balanced with again this slightly off centred classical hour and minute dial.
When you flip the watch around, you will see a nice totally new in-house hand-wound movement made out of 255 components beating at 3Hz and holding 90 hours of power reserve and naturally you will see the moon sphere from the other side, but most importantly you will see a mechanism in the center which will help you set the moon with the crown to its precise position since it could be a little bit tricky to do so if you relied on your eyes only.
And yes, this is a high precision moon phase indicator watch as you wouldn’t need to correct it for the next 122 years was this watch to be running continuously till then and then you will have to correct it by one day. I know it’s something in a certain way totally useless, but I nevertheless love the fact that watchmakers think of these kinds of things.
Anyhow this watch is limited to 28 pieces only, but I think that the idea is so good that I hope Arnold & Son will find other ways of expressing it in another form in the future. So as I told you in a previous video, we will have a few of these short videos based on what we manage to film and see by ourselves and we have more coming.