Racing around to come up behind you again … The “Dark Side of the Moon” was game-changing. So is the Ochs und Junior Day Night. It is hard to describe this watch in a few words; can a mechanical watch be any smarter? The Ochs und Junior Day Night is, so to speak, a smartwatch (smart = intelligent, elegant, chic). A relative rare movement when a silicon hairspring/escapement drives extremely ingenious mechanics, to not only display time/date, but also the position of the sun including sunrise and sunset, the length of the day, the moon phase and the position of the moon. All packed into a great titanium case with a skillfully handpatinated three-dimensional dial featuring a sun made of gold … a never ending pleasure to look at – and this look tells you the “official” (to make it to your meeting in time) as well as the “real sun” time (to plan your outdoor activities or to reconnect to nature).

You see the sun revolving in 24h (hence the dots on my watch) “around” the earth – and the moon, running a little slower. You can therefore see the position of the sun and the moon in the sky, on the blue part of the dial. (Actually if you align the watch so that the 12 faces south, the sun and moon point in the direction of the real position of the celestial bodies in the sky.) When the sun (moon) leaves the blue sky and disappears in the golden (actually brass) part of the dial (the “space”), we have the sunset. (That’s why this part is patinated slightly red!) And in the morning – on the left part of the dial – the sun rises when it gets towards the blue sky part of the dial (and equally you see the moon rising into the evening/night sky). As the length of the day changes throughout the year, the blue and golden areas are not static, but change over the course of the year!

In summer the days are longer, so there is more of the blue sky around the dial. Heavenly. As the sun and moon have different speeds, you can also read the moonphase from the angle between the sun and moon: during the full moon they are opposite, new moon means, the moon hides under the sun. So many different kinds of information on the dial, but you will miss a second hand. This may seem odd, especially as the watch is regulated to 0/+5 seconds per day. But the Ochs und Junior Day Night does not measure seconds, but rather the course of the sun in eons.

Ochs und junior watches, by Dr. Ludwig Oechslin, offer special solutions based not on complicated, but rather on ingeniously simple solutions. Based on 2824 or UN movements, the use of gearings (instead of levers etc.) reduces the number of parts dramatically and improves reliability. The design is straightforward yet functional with e. g. visible machine marks on the caseback and can be extensively customised – to find out more, play around with the configurator on their website (be careful, you may burn up hours …).

A funny side note about the kind of the “brutalist” basic design: the «inventor» of brutalism, Le Courbousier, was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the (new) home of ochs und junior. Trying to describe it again with just a few words, I (freely) quote Dr. Öchslin: “next to the standard, you see also the real time: the sun as it rises, runs around in the sky and sets. As the days change in length throughout the year, this has to be displayed too … and because it’s fun … there’s the moon as well …”

The Ochs und Junior Day Night is a lot of things, a smart watch, a freak and a tool, it combines watchmaking, math, art and poetry in a very unique way. I just love the fact, that this watch shows both aspects of time, the standardised, technical part as well as the “natural” one defined by sun and moon. Possibly the hottest watch under the sun.