On October 19, coinciding with the opening of Dubai Watch Week, H. Moser & Cie. launched the Streamliner Perpetual Moon Concept Meteorite. This timepiece combines the beauty of nature with the savoir-faire of Moser: Made golden and with a subtle a fume effect, the so- called Widmanstätten pattern appears like on no other dials out there.
Ancestors of the San people were surely surprised on that evening or day given the lack of records from the prehistorical event some 30,000 years ago we don’t know the time of day the Gibeon meteorite fell out of the sky. But we do know that it came towards the Earth at a speed of around 27 kilometres per second, that it had a luminous tail of gas and incandescent materials, and that it made an incredible noise as it exploded in the atmosphere and scattered in fragmented pieces over an enormous 390 by 120 kilometres area in the Kalahari Desert in Namibia. An unexpected fate for a meteorite which formed some 4.5 billion years ago in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
We also know that these fragments were used for tools and weapons for thousands of years by the local Nama people before Gibeon findings were documented by British Captain J. E. Alexander in 1936.
So, what makes pieces of the Gibeon so special that some parts of it now encased in the cushion shaped 40-millimetre Streamliner collection? Thanks to its composition of around 93% iron, 7.7% nickel, and trace amounts of cobalt and phosphorus, it has a unique so-called Widmanstätten pattern, and it is also very stable when it comes to oxidation. Its crystalline structure created over millions of years of slow cooling is highly regarded by jewellers – and other watchmakers, including Bovet, Frederique Constant, Kross Studio, Louis Moinet, Omega, Rolex, and others. Given that there are some 26 tons of Gibeon fragments there is enough to go around.
It is however a complicated process to achieve the pattern: after cutting a beautiful slice you must etch it in acidic baths to highlight the pattern. The unusual name came in 1808 after observations by Count Alois von Beckh Widmanstätten (1754-1849), the director of the Imperial Porcelain works in Vienna. (However modern historians claim that English mineralogist William Thomson (1760 –1806), who used the name Guglielmo Thomson when he moved to Italy, had published findings about the pattern already in 1804.)
Given all this, a meteorite dial is a logical choice for a watch celebrating celestial movement. The moon phase with a moon in red gold is extremely accurate: it drifts with only one day after 1,027 years. Here at Worldtempus we also salute its user friendliness with a discreet push-button on the case flank which allows the moon phase to be finely adjusted.
The hour and minute hands have Globolight® inserts – which could be described three-dimensional Super-Luminova® which has a more intense glow than paint. If you turn the watch over for look through the caseback, you will see the HMC 270 automatic manufacture calibre with a skeletonised oscillating weight in 18-carat red gold with beautiful bevelling and straight-grained finish.
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