Recently，Thierry Stern，Vice President of Patek Philippe declared that the Celestial Calendar Ref. 5106 was going to be Patek Philippe’s addition to the Only Watch 2009 coming up in September. According to Tierry Stein and as I know of, astronomical indication watches are one of the rarest type of complications as well as the most interesting one.
The Celestial Calendar Ref. 5106 is 44.2mm at diameter and 11.15mm at thickness. The case body is crafted from 18k rose gold while the bezel uses 22K rose gold, a softer material, to apply the exquisite guilloched pattern with a special a special hand tool created just for this watch.
The luminosity and depth of the extremely beautiful dial, according to Sandrine Stern, is very impressive and second to none. This dial displays the northern hemisphere night sky rotating counterclockwise. It shows you the position of stars relative to the merdian passage of Sirius, the angular position of the moon, its moon phase and merdian passage. You can also see the date displayed on the periphery of the dial.
These rare and marvelous dial displays are achieved through a series of stacked sapphire crystal discs. The celestial background is a blue sapphire crystal disc on a wheel with 279 teeth. This disk reproduces the orbit of the moon, and via a planetary gear train, it also drives a subsidiary crystal disc depicting the waxing and waning of the moon in a small round aperture. Above it, on a wheel with 356 teeth, is a transparent sapphire crystal disc bearing the sky chart on one side and an image of the Milky Way galaxy on the other. For this invention, Patek Philippe was awarded Swiss Patent CH 688 171 B5.
In addition, the beautiful dial features leaf-shaped openwork hand and a calendar hand tipped with a half-moon shape in rose gold. It also features the four points of the compass as well as the wording of “PATEK PHILIPPE GENEV”.
Beating inside is the Patek caliber in-house 240LUCLC Manual Winding movement, a mater-piece of precision meachnical engineering. The movement is 38mm at diameter and 7mm thick, composed of 315 parts. All parts are meticulously finished by hand. The edges of all steel components are beveled and polished, and each tooth of each gear wheel is manually polished with a rotating hardwood disk to reduce friction at the wheel contact points. A mini-rotor recessed the rotor is crafted from heavy 22k gold. Even slight movements of the wrist aresufficient to supply the necessary winding energy.
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