Heritage Watch Manufactory - Gets More Complicated
WORLDTEMPUS - 1 March 2012
This new watch is called the Firmamentum and - hard to believe as it may be - it is the most complicated timepiece yet to be issued by the young Heritage Watch Manufactory. What, at first glance, could easily be mistaken for a chronograph thanks to the arrangement of the buttons on the right side of the case, is indeed a complicated navigational instrument.
Astronomers often utilize the hour angle to track a star's movement and location during the course of the night and to identify the same star the next night. Astronomers also use the hour angle to locate and map stars in the night sky. To figure these coordinates, they calculate the angle between two planes: one plane contains earth's axis and a meridian (often the zenith), and the other contains earth's axis and a given point.
Heritage Watch Manufactory's latest oeuvre is practically a portable measuring instrument to help accomplish this. In addition to providing the local time, it measures the motions of the earth, sun, and other planets in our solar system and even the other stars with the help of the hour angle, which the instrument calculates based both on solar time and sidereal time. The sidereal hour angle can be read from the instrument as the time in hours, minutes and seconds (in sidereal time). Thanks to a variable-speed gear train (which measures the difference between solar and sidereal time and is so precise that the deviation per day is only 0.0005 seconds), a button on the case is able to change the display over to solar time, which allows the instrument to observe two different celestial bodies within our solar system. The fixed solar time hand can also double as a 24-hour hand (or a second time zone).
A chronograph mechanism embedded within manually wound Caliber 870 allows the watch to be synchronized with a time signal much like historical observation watches.
Other displays shown by the total of thirteen hands on the dial include power reserve and status display for regulation of (what the company calls the Vivax) inertia-variable balance wheel. Beating at 18,000 vph, this movement boasts 483 individual components. And it's all been fit into a 44.5 mm stainless steel watch.
This timepiece-cum-navigational instrument is destined to be something for just a very few collectors and astronomy enthusiasts. However, this momentous mechanical machine once again underscores the cerebral approach of the interesting new brand on haute horology's horizon.
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