4um: The 8 Most Accurate Moon Phase Wristwatches Today

Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
Science/Tech
See other Science/Tech Articles
Title: The 8 Most Accurate Moon Phase Wristwatches Today
Source: Quill & Pad
URL Source: http://quillandpad.com/2015/07/05/t ... moon-phase-wristwatches-today/
Published: Jul 5, 2015
Author: by Joshua Munchow
Post Date: 2015-08-31 21:24:31 by X-15
Keywords: None
Views: 25
Comments: 1

Oh, lunar majesty of near-earth orbit, why doth your shine provoke lack of doubt?
Awake you keep the owl and wombat, all the while a secret kept, through the blackness ever soaring, only leaving in the morning (usually).
Yet over time you seem to morph from something trim to a healthy girth. Early man discovered the secret and since there was no way to keep it we charted your path and labeled your phases until we sang our own self praises for locking down a piece of the skies with just our mind, our thoughts, and eyes.

Hmm, waxing poetically about moon phases (see what I did there? The moon waxes and wanes during its phases. Science pun. Never mind.) has gotten me excited to take a trip through certain “phases” of engineering excellence to discuss the most accurate moon phase complications in a wristwatch today.
While this might not actually be a definitive list (there really are a lot of watches out there so please leave a comment if you think that I missed one), and a piece from yesteryear that we don’t know about might be more accurate – though probably not worn on the wrist – I’m guessing that at least the top four spots are . . . spot on. Okay, seriously, I just can’t stop sometimes.
When it comes to moon phases, the time it takes to go from full moon to full moon is 29.5 days.
Well, pretty much.
Its actual synodic time is 29 ½ days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, and 2.9 seconds.
Astronomy nerd side-note: the moon has multiple defined periods for a lunar month, including sidereal, synodic, tropical, anomalistic, and draconic. The two that really matter to most people are sidereal and synodic. The sidereal month, which is used by astronomers, is the length of time it takes for the moon to return to the same position against an average of background stars. What matters for us watch nerds is the synodic interpretation, which is basically the phases as they relate to the relative alignment with the sun and earth. The average for the synodic month is 29.530587981 days. This will be important later (so please memorize this number).
The standard accuracy for a wristwatch’s synodic month (moon phase period) is generated by a gear wheel featuring 59 teeth (it advances by one tooth per day), which nets you a little over two and a half years of accuracy before the indication is off by one full day.
That’s not too shabby, but if you think of that in an equivalent error in rate for timekeeping in a C.O.S.C.-rated watch, this amount of “accuracy” would mean the timepiece would gain one minute and 34.6 seconds per day. We wouldn’t accept that.
So the next step was for watchmakers to make a system with a finer-toothed gear, boasting 135 teeth to be exact. With this new, more precise moon phase mechanism, many higher end watches have been able to bump that 2.5-year accuracy up to 122.5 years.
Now, that is something serious. I don’t know about you, but that is longer than I expect to be alive and to care about the accuracy of the moon phase watch on my wrist.
But, as with anything, accuracy is relative and some people wanted more . . . much more. So super-accurate moon phase complications were developed. Here is a rundown of the 8 most accurate moon phase watches available today.
One for each day of the week, and an extra for good measure!
((I skipped to the end, the most accurate wristwatch of all))
The Andreas Strehler Sauterelle à Lune Perpétuelle 2M!
Huh?
Just wait, the story gets better. As Strehler presented his watch at Baselworld 2014, he also mentioned how he had written a computer program to calculate the gear teeth ratios to achieve the best accuracy he could.
As a side note, he mentioned that he actually had another ratio that was far more accurate than the one in the Sauterelle à Lune Perpétuelle, but it seemed almost crazy and overkill to put it into a watch.
A couple months later he did just that.

Utilizing the same number of parts and simply changing the ratios and number of teeth, Strehler was able to shatter the previous record and move into his own category: fundamentally perfect.
This new version of the watch has a moon phase 145 times more accurate than its own predecessor. The Sauterelle à Lune Perpétuelle 2M will be off by one single day after, get this, 2,060,757 years.
That’s not a typo: 2.06 million years!
This is such a long amount of time that the moon phase can be considered perfect, because by the time you would need to adjust it by one day, the rotational period of the earth, and the moon, and the relative orbits of both will have changed by such a degree that, because the moon is gradually moving away from the earth, our days will be about 36 seconds longer than they are now and every calculation will be null and void for multiple reasons.
So, basically, this is a perfect moon phase watch. It can’t be made any more perfect for the simple reason that the numbers involved in calculating it will change in less time than it requires adjusting the moon phase by a single day to be in sync again.
Boom!
*Andreas Strehler drops the mic and walks away*
To read more about this watch, please see Blood Moons, Lunar Tetrads, And The Andreas Strehler Sauterelle A Lune Perpétuelle and Andreas Strehler Entered Into ‘Guinness Book Of World Records.’
If moon phases interest you — and the chances are that if you have made it this far, then they do — you will probably love the moon phase app developed by Finnish independent watchmaker Stepan Sarpaneva, which is available free on the app store on iTunes at itunes.apple.com/us/app/sarpaneva-moon.

Click for Full Text!
Poster Comment:
Read the whole article, embedded links/etc.(2 images)
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: X-15 (#0)
Read the whole article, embedded links/etc.

Artful prose.
"a C.O.S.C.-rated watch"
I had to look that up:
COSC - Wikipedia

Contrôle Officiel Suisse des Chronomètres, the Official Swiss Chronometer Testing Institute, which is the institute responsible for certifying the accuracy and precision of wristwatches in Switzerland.

Most avant-garde of the examples:

Fender Stratocaster with the sea-foam green dial: Coolness
Real Moon Joure: Snazzy
Sky Moon Tourbillon: Magnifique
-------
"They're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time." -- Col. Puller, USMC
GreyLmist posted on 2015-09-04 4:24:04 ET (2 images) Reply Trace Private Reply
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest

Freedom4um