The headquarters and seat of Greubel Forsey in La Chaux-de-Fonds is one of the most fascinating buildings in the entire Swiss watch industry. The centerpiece of the facility is a 17th-century farmhouse, purchased in 2007 by company founders Robert Greubel and Stephen Forsey. Throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s, the duo worked gradually to expand the building into its current form, which features a tall modernist glass-walled studio swelling from the side of the once quaint log home.
top of page
bottom of page
Patek Philippe replica 5102 Sky Moon Celestial
There are a lot of superlatives in the world of luxury watchmaking, but every now and then a watch pops up that deserves every superlative you can say about it, and more. Most of these watches come from Patek Philippe. This may be an obvious thing (and a constant repetition and disgusting thing), but there is hardly a genre of watchmaking that Patek Philippe is not good at (well, they haven't done that much yet) dive watches have been around for the last 180 years or so, but you can't have everything).
While Patek Philippe has produced watches of exceptionally high quality throughout its history – in fact, this is the foundation of the company’s reputation – it is especially known for its watchmaking complications and intricate timepieces. Patek Philippe has and still manufactures superlative versions of every major horological complication. Minute repeaters, perpetual calendars, split-seconds chronographs, astronomical complications, and watches with multiple complications are all produced by Patek Philippe and are still listed in the "Grand Complications" section of the catalog today. More than 30 kinds of watches have been produced. As you might expect, most of them are extremely complicated and represent the accumulated knowledge of nearly two centuries of complicated watchmaking.replica watches online
One of the most beautiful watches in the Patek Philippe catalog (beauty is in the eye of the beholder though) is the reference 5102 Sky Moon Celestial. Even before you understand how it works or what information it displays, the watch is instantly captivating. It’s one of the largest watches Patek makes, measuring 44mm in diameter (although it’s also pretty thin, especially considering its complication—about 10mm, not much thicker than the 6119 Calatrava at 8.08mm x 39mm). The dial space is put to good use - most of the front of the watch is taken up by a very detailed map of the night sky showing visible stars, the arc of the Milky Way (where many of us city dwellers are) forget you can be seen on a clear and dark night) and a moon phase complication.
The dial is actually three dials—more specifically, three rotating sapphire discs. The middle disc is dark blue and has a small hole in it for the smaller lower disc, which shows the phases of the moon. The uppermost discs are transparent with star maps and depictions of the Milky Way, and each disc is only 0.2 millimeters thick.
The ellipse engraved on the underside of the dial represents the horizon, and the stars visible at any time above the horizon are surrounded by it. The disk that hosts the stars rotates once per day, or more precisely, once per sidereal day. A day is defined as the time it takes a given celestial body to return to the same point in the sky - for example, a solar day is the time it takes the sun to return to its zenith, or highest point in the sky (24 hours on average, although any actual day's The length varies throughout the year; our standard 24-hour day is the "average" solar day). A sidereal day, on the other hand, is the time it takes for a star to return to the zenith, and is slightly shorter than a solar day -- 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.0905 seconds, compared to 24 hours. mean solar day. wholesale fashion watches
The reason for this is that the Earth moves along its orbit as it spins, so the Earth must rotate a little more than a full revolution for the Sun to return to its zenith position as seen from Earth. Stars, on the other hand, are far away (many light-years, not eight light-minutes from the Sun), so this parallax effect does not occur.
Knowing sidereal time is key to understanding how the other astronomical indicators on the 5102 work. Of course, stars rise or set below the horizon during sidereal time. If you draw a line on the dial from 12:00 to 6:00, you get a line that represents the overhead meridian at the observer's location. As the moon phase aperture rotates, you can observe the point at which it passes the meridian. There is also a small yellow hand on the dial, next to the large star representing Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky (Sirius itself is very bright, and is very close to Earth, at a distance of only 8.6 light-years). The pointer will allow you to observe the meridian passages of Sirius.replica watches for sale
Another key point is that the horizon ellipse is specific to a particular latitude - for example, the celestial body is constructed to show the night sky over Geneva, which is at 42.6 degrees north latitude (for comparison, New York is at about 40 degrees north latitude; the North Pole is at 90 degrees north latitude ). However, if set up correctly, the star map will be accurate for any location in the world at the same latitude as Geneva, and will also be an accurate approximation for any location close to that latitude, although the accuracy drops off significantly the farther you go from the northern latitude 46.2 degrees off.
The mean solar time is displayed in the traditional way, with hour and minute hands.
The star map complication is technically known as the constellation map, and Patek Philippe has used this complication before – the constellation map star map was used in two of Patek Philippe's most famous complication pocket watches. In 1922, industrialist and automotive pioneer James Ward Packard had Patek Philippe create a highly complicated pocket watch with a star map for his hometown of Warren, Ohio, and of course the 1933 The Henry Graves grand complication watch delivered in 2009 - the most complicated watch in the world for many years - has a star map of New York City (I think the star map of Packard watches and Graves watches will be very Proximity - Warren is at 41.2376°N and New York is at 40.7128°N.) The Caliber 89 Patek Philippe pocket watch launched in 1989 to celebrate the company's 150th anniversary (among other things) also featured a flat star map, replica Audemars Piguet Watches
The flat star chart itself is older than the Patek Philippe – much older. In fact, it's older than mechanical clocks. The ancestor of the star chart in the watch was the astrolabe – basically a flat chart that was operated by hand rather than by clockwork. The first astrolabe was invented in ancient Greece and reached a very high level of sophistication in the medieval Islamic world. Astrolabes, like flat charts, are often designed for a specific location, but universal astrolabes have also been designed and built. Such star charts and similar astronomical indications appear in the earliest known European mechanical clocks, including the astronomical clock of Richard Abbot of Wallingford, completed in the mid-1300s. The clock displays mean time in isochrone and anisochrone, as well as true solar time. It also shows the phases of the moon, shows the position of the lunar nodes and the tidal height of London Bridge - all this at a time when European civilization was being ravaged by social unrest and the bubonic plague, just to show you that if you're not online, How much work can you get done.
Every mechanical watch is, in a sense, a time machine—mechanical watches powered by coil springs and mechanical escapements have been around for about five centuries, and clocks are even older, so any Mechanical watches all have a direct connection to a long history behind them. watch. But Sky Moon Celestial doesn't just delve into the history of watches, or mechanical timepieces. When you look at the dial, you see a microcosm of the universe on your wrist, the human view of things infinitely larger than our own little world. But you also see a long history of astronomy and instruments created out of practical necessity, and a fascination with the harmonious and apparently unchanging motion of luminous points in the night sky. No-nonsense watch - due to its cost and complexity, only a handful of people will own it, but it will provide an intellectual, emotional and even spiritual reward that no other wholesale replica watches can match.