ULYSSE NARDIN Blast Moonstruck: fly me to the moon!
As a new lunar year starts today, Ulysse Nardin is launching an ultra-design version of one of its historical astronomical complications: the Moonstruck. With this Manufacture Worldtimer housed in the geometrical case of a Blast, Ulysse Nardin offers exceptional aficionados a new celestial odyssey, with reinvented watchmaking mechanics reproducing as faithfully as possible the sun’s visible trajectory and the lunar cycles. Today, this new Blast, descended from the trilogy of astronomical watches created nearly forty years ago by the master watchmaker Ludwig Oechslin, proposes to set in motion the primordial elements of the visible celestial mechanisms so that everyone can gain a poetic understanding of the universe that envelops us thanks to a contemporary and intuitive display.
The Blast Moonstruck reproduces the moon’s rotation, the apparent movement of the sun around the globe as we observe it from Earth and a tidal chart. Designed to make this dance between the sun and the moon intelligible and intensely poetic, the geocentric display of the Blast Moonstruck is easy to understand, even for a beginner with no knowledge of astronomy. Explanations.
The starry firmament is a map for sailors, a playground for lovers and the primordial calendar of all civilizations. In this sparkling ballet where, as seen from the ground, Earth always appears to be at the center of the universe, the sun and moon define the cycles of the days, months and seasons. It took the genius of astronomers to decipher this waltz that keeps time so well. Ever since the Bronze Age, they have been setting up observatories that enable them to devise calendars that are accurate to the nearest day. Over the generations, they have built up their grammar of the heavens.
The Blast Moonstruck, like all watches incorporating elaborated astronomical information, seeks to be a miniaturized extrapolation of the formidable turret clocks constructed towards the end of the Middle Ages by towns of consequence. With an easily readable and understandable display, it is the successor of the astronomical instruments of the past. Thanks to its sophisticated mechanism, it assures the display of the time in a place chosen from among the 24 principal time zones that the world has been using since the Washington Convention of 1884. By means of pushers located on the left-hand side of the case, it is possible to put the main time display forward or back in leaps of one hour to adjust to another time zone.