Review: Jacob & Co. Astronomia Sky

If you’ve got $680,000 and you don’t want to spend it on a house, then how about this instead, what is perhaps the single craziest watch in the entire world: the Jacob & Co. Astronomia Sky. It’s even madder than you think.

Background

The approach Jacob & Co. take to watchmaking is the same way Blofeld approaches running a small to medium-sized business: utter insanity. Most other watchmakers see a wristwatch as an instrument to impart the time, perhaps adding some complexity or artistry to communicate personality, but not Jacob & Co. Their approach is to enjoy a few tabs of acid, watch all of Disney’s Fantasia and then put pen to paper.

One particular trip resulted in the utterly bonkers Astronomia. This is not that watch, because after all was said and done, Jacob & Co. decided the Astronomia wasn’t quite mad enough. So back they went to the drawing board and they designed this, the Astronomia Sky.

The first Astronomia was unveiled in 2014 and attempted to take a three-dimensional representation of our planetary satellite system and put it inside a watch. You see what I mean? That’s no healthy way to start a watch concept. Last time something like that happened, aliens invaded and Will Smith was recruited to put everything back to normal.

Jacob & Co. were, despite the absolute insanity of the proposition, rather successful with their endeavour. The Astronomia contained the Earth, the moon, and in there somewhere was the time as well, because as we’ll need to keep reminding ourselves, this is also a watch.

Balancing the time—quite literally—is the regulating organ of the watch, a tourbillon that rotates in not just one, not two, but three axes. Just to be sure. You can never have enough modes of rotation, my old nan always used to say.

One axis is as you’d expect from a tourbillon, taking a minute, the other is perpendicular to that, taking five minutes, to make it a double tourbillon. So, where’s the third to make it a triple? That’s right, the whole thing rotates about the central core every twenty minutes like a complete lunatic. Not only that, but the Earth and moon rotate too.

You might be wondering, how on Earth do you tell the time if the timekeeping part of this display is doing a 360 loop the loop every 20 minutes? Yeah, well that’s the clever part: it always stays upright. How? I think it’s easier at this point just to assume witchcraft. I don’t have the brain capacity to try and figure it out.

In any case, since the whole thing looks like what it must be like inside the brain of Neil deGrasse Tyson, I’m not sure I’d have any brain capacity to spare. Look at this thing for too long and you’ll surely go insane, lost inside the existential crisis spending time with it brings about. Who am I? What is my purpose? Am I but a mote of dust in the infinite universe of everything? Producer Michael used to be a suit-wearing accountant until he got his.

As bananas as all that is, wearing a miniature world on your wrist, those features described to you then all carry over from the original Astronomia, which makes them old news. And old news is boring. If this is the even better, even madder Astronomia Sky, then surely there’s even more madness still? You’d better believe it.

Review

So, what does adding “Sky” to Astronomia actually mean? Cast your minds back to the acid trip that got us here in the first place and it can only mean one thing. Yes, that’s right. They went and squeezed the entire universe in there too.

Deep below the orbiting display—and I do mean deep, this watch is 47mm across and 25mm thick—is a heat-blued titanium map of the night sky that, in conjunction with an elliptical window, will show you your night sky from the perspective of the Northern Hemisphere. That way you can check and make sure aliens haven’t abducted you and placed you an almost identical zoo planet for the amusement of their young.

The whole thing makes one rotation every sidereal year—don’t ask—which gives it the added bonus of being a month indicator as well, cleverly depicted on the outer edge and visible through the sapphire windows in the side of the rose gold case. Waste not, want not, my old nan also used to say, and I’m pretty sure she was referring to the efficient use of every surface in a $680,000 hyperwatch.

But that’s not the only trick up the sleeve of the updated Astronomia Sky. On the original Astronomia, the Earth and moon used to sit across from one another, balancing each other in the way the time and tourbillon do. In place of the Earth here is a seconds display that rotates around its centre, and kind of looks like an orbiting space station with an artificial gravity ring, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey. At least I think it does, and I’m not even on whatever it was Jacob & Co. were doing when they actually made this.

The Earth has been relocated pride of place in the centre, a hand engraved and lacquered titanium orb that looks like it’d be the best marble in any young boy’s marble collection. Here it’s been upgraded with a tinted sapphire half-sphere, which—you guessed it—represents the shaded half of our globe during what we Earthlings call “night”. The whole ensemble spins with the main carriage once every 20 minutes, with the globe itself geared down to spin once every 24 hours relative to the sapphire half sphere. Yeah, try and get your melon around that.

The moon is still, of course, a massive diamond, cut with 288 facets into a sphere called the Jacob cut, spinning once every minute. If it was H. Moser that had made this watch, perhaps it would’ve been made out of cheese like the real moon. It’s not, so I guess we’ll have to make do with diamond. It takes about two tense, sweaty weeks to make one Jacob cut diamond, because it’s just so easy to overdo each facet. Do that and the others have to be redone as well and the whole thing ends up getting smaller. It’s the same principle as spreading out chocolates in the chocolate box to make it still look full, only in this case it costs a shedload of money and gets you fired.

Put it all together and you get one of the maddest things to ever befall an unsuspecting wrist. It’s certainly not small, or dainty, and I doubt it’s the kind of thing Steve McQueen would’ve ditched his Submariner for, but nevertheless it is still absolutely incredible. It’s easy to dismiss a watch like this for being too much, but for me that’s a bit like looking up at the night sky at a dark site, seeing the band of the Milky Way and dismissing that as “too much.”

The Astronomia Sky is an incredible demonstration of what’s possible when the sky really is the limit. It’s a mesmerising and intoxicating piece of mechanical sculpture that just happens to be affixable to the wrist by way of the most nervous piece of reptile skin since Crocodile Dundee. I’m sad to say that getting to experience it for myself is a privilege only a few people will enjoy, since this is limited to just 18 pieces. I suppose they wanted to keep the risk of existential lobotomies to a minimum.