Jacob & Co. Astronomia Sky Jacob & Co. Astronomia Sky. It's even crazier than you can imagine.
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Jacob & Co. approached watchmaking the same way Blofeld approached running a small and medium-sized business: downright crazy. Most other watchmakers see a wristwatch as a tool to tell time, perhaps adding some complexity or artistry to convey personality, but Jacobs & Co. don't see it that way. Their approach is to enjoy a few psychedelic pills, watch all the Disney fantasies, and put it into practice.
One particular trip led to completely insane astronomy. This isn't that watch, because after all, Jacob & Co. doesn't think the Astronomia is crazy enough. So they went back to the drawing board and designed this, Astronomia Sky.
The first Astronomia, launched in 2014, attempted to take our planetary satellite system in three dimensions and put it in a watch. Do you get me? That's not a healthy way to start a watch concept. The last time something like this happened, aliens invaded and Will Smith was recruited to make things right.
Despite the absolute insanity of the proposal, Jacobs & Company's efforts have been quite successful. Astronomy includes the Earth, the Moon, and time in it too, because we need to keep reminding ourselves that it's also a watch.
The balance time is literally the watch's regulating mechanism, which is a tourbillon that spins not just on one axis, or two, but three. Just to be sure. My old grandma used to say that you can never have enough spin patterns.
One axis is as you would expect from a tourbillon, one minute, and the other perpendicular to that axis, five minutes, making it a double tourbillon. So where is the third that makes it a triple? That's right, the whole thing revolves around the central core every twenty minutes like a complete lunatic. Not only that, but the Earth and Moon also rotate.
You might be wondering, how on earth do you know the time if the timekeeping portion of this display cycles through 360 degrees every 20 minutes? Yep, that's the clever part: it always stays upright. how? I think it's easier to assume witchcraft at this point. I don't have enough brain power to try and figure this out.
Anyway, since the whole thing looks like it would have been in Neil deGrasse Tyson's brain, I'm not sure I have any brain capacity to spare. Watch this thing for too long and you're sure to go nuts, lost in taking your time and the existential crisis it brings. who I am? What is my purpose? Am I just a speck of dust in the vast universe? Producer Michael was an accountant in a suit before qualifying as a professional.
Wearing a miniature world on your wrist like a banana, the features described to you are carried over from the original Astronomy, making them old news. Old news is boring. If this is the better, crazier astronomical sky, there must be crazier ones out there, right? You better believe it.
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So what exactly does it mean to add "sky" to Astronomy? Thinking back to the psychedelic trip that got us here in the first place, it can only mean one thing. Well, that's right. They squeezed the whole universe into it too.
Deep below the orbital display (and by depth I mean, this watch is 47mm in diameter and 25mm thick) is a map of the night sky in hot blue titanium, combined with an oval window that can be viewed from the northern hemisphere Show you the night sky. That way you can check and make sure the aliens haven't kidnapped you and placed you on an almost identical zoo planet for the entertainment of their kids.
The whole mechanism rotates once every sidereal year - don't ask - which gives it the added bonus that it also doubles as a month indicator, subtly depicted on the outer rim and through a sapphire window on the side of the rose gold case visible.
But that's not the only trick the updated Astronomia Sky has. In the original Astronomia, the Earth and the Moon used to face each other, balancing each other in the manner of time and a tourbillon. In place of Earth here is a seconds display that rotates around its center, looking a bit like an orbiting space station with an artificial gravity ring, like the one in 2001: A Space Odyssey. At least I think it does, and I don't even care what Jacob's company did to actually make this product.
The globe has been relocated prominently at the centre, a hand-carved and painted titanium sphere that looks like the finest marble in any little boy's marble collection. Here it is upgraded to a colored sapphire hemisphere which, you guessed it, represents the shadowed part of the Earth during what we Earthlings call "Night". The entire ensemble rotates with the main bracket every 20 minutes, while the globe itself rotates relative to the sapphire hemisphere every 24 hours. Yes, try to get your melons to bypass this.
Of course, the moon is still a giant diamond, cut with 288 facets into a sphere called a Jacob's cut, which rotates once a minute. If this watch was made by H. Moser & Cie., maybe it would be made of cheese like the real moon. That's not the case, so I guess we'll just have to make do with diamonds. It takes about two weeks of intense, sweaty work to create a Jacobs cut diamond, as each facet is prone to overworking. That was done, and the rest had to be redone, and the whole thing ended up being smaller. It's the same principle as spreading out chocolates in a box of chocolates so they still look plump, only in this case, it costs a lot of money and gets you fired.
Put it all together and you have one of the craziest things to ever happen to an unsuspecting wrist. It's certainly not small or delicate, and I doubt Steve McQueen would ditch his Submariner for something like this, but nonetheless, it's absolutely incredible. It's easy to dismiss a watch like this for going too far, but for me it's a bit like looking up at the night sky in a dark place, seeing the Milky Way, and thinking it's "too much."
Astronomia Sky is an incredible demonstration of what's possible when the sky really is the limit. It's a mesmerizing, intoxicating piece of mechanical sculpture that just so happens to be secured to the wrist by the tightest reptilian skin since Crocodile Dundee. I think they are trying to minimize the risk of an existential lobotomy.
