VESPER

Vesper · Automatique · Cal. V-01 Lune

The dark hours, kept.

An automatic wristwatch with a moonphase that is correct tonight — read from your own clock, drawn with tonight's true terminator.

SHOWING YOUR LOCAL TIME

Fig. 01 — Construction

Five layers, one breath.

Crystal, hands, dial, case, strap — pulled apart without a single photograph.

Wound by wear. Kept by the moon.

Crystaldomed sapphire, drawn as light

Handsdauphine, gold — your actual time

Dialguilloché · 59 rings, plotted by code

CaseØ 38.5 mm, brushed and polished

Strapmidnight suede, 20 mm

Movement

Calibre V-01.

Automatic. The rotor winds it from the motion of a wrist; the balance keeps the time by refusing, four times a second, to be hurried. What you see below is a working diagram, not a photograph — and the balance really beats at the true four hertz.

28,800 beats an hour

Four hertz. The seconds hand doesn't glide — it takes eight small, certain steps every second, and this page animates exactly that.

41 hours of reserve

Set it down on Friday evening and it is still telling the truth on Sunday morning. After that, it waits.

24 jewels

Synthetic rubies at every pivot that matters — bearings, not decoration, though nobody minds that they're red.

Complication

The moon, without apology.

Most moonphase watches carry a disc with two painted moons and a 59-tooth wheel. It is a beautiful lie of averages: it assumes a lunar month of 29.5 days, and the real one runs 29.53059 — so the mechanical moon drifts a full day roughly every 2 years and 8 months.

Tonight's moon, drawn with its current phase.

reading your clock…

This page doesn't drift. The aperture at six o'clock cheats, honestly: instead of a painted disc, the moon is recomputed from your clock on every visit and drawn with tonight's true terminator — the same curve you'd see from your window.

The mathematics is plain: count the days since a known new moon (January 6th, 2000, 18:14 UTC), take the remainder of the synodic month — 29.530588853 days — and the remainder is the moon's age. Everything on this page that claims to know the sky derives from that one line.

Owners of the mechanical version are asked to correct the moon once every couple of years, by pressing a small pusher with a tool they have invariably lost. Owners of this page are asked to do nothing.

Specification

Cal. V-01 Lune

CaseØ 38.5 mm, steel — brushed flanks, polished bezel
Thickness9.8 mm, domed
CrystalSapphire, box-domed, inner anti-reflective
DialMidnight blue guilloché — 59 rings, plotted by code
HandsDauphine, gilt, lume-filled
MovementAutomatic, 4 Hz · 28,800 vph
Power reserve41 hours
Jewels24
MoonphaseComputed from your clock; never needs correcting
Water resistance5 ATM — rain, and the washing of hands
StrapMidnight suede, 20 mm
Ticks per day691,200

28,800 an hour, twenty-four hours: the arithmetic is the romance. Every one of them is drawn, not photographed.

Cal. V-01 Lune · steel on suede

$1,850

Automatic, assembled from equations. The moon is included at no charge.

Delivery — by moonrise, eventually