WATCHMAKERS ARE STILL OBSESSED WITH SPACE - HERE'S WHY IT NEVER GOES OUT OF STYLE

Haute horology's fascination with tracking the heavens long predates the mechanical clock itself, and this year's Watches and Wonders releases leaned into that history more visibly than most recent editions.

Spanning both traditional celestial complications like moon phase dials and, more unusually, pieces genuinely designed with actual space travel in mind.

Roughly 2,000 watches have accompanied astronauts on space missions since the 1960s, from the Seiko Pogue to the Rolex GMT-Master to the Omega Speedmaster Professional, which remains the only watch NASA has formally certified for spacewalks following its role during the Apollo missions. This year's crop of new releases included several pieces built explicitly with actual space conditions in mind rather than purely referencing space aesthetically, including the IWC Pilot's Venturer Vertical Drive and Bremont's Supernova - watches engineered around the specific mechanical challenges of functioning outside Earth's atmosphere, rather than simply carrying a space-inspired dial design back on the ground.

Moon phase complications, meanwhile, continued their steady presence across more conventional dress and complication watches this year, reflecting horology's much older relationship with celestial tracking - moon phase displays predate accurate mechanical timekeeping by centuries, originally developed to track lunar cycles for agricultural and religious purposes long before they became a decorative complication valued primarily for their visual appeal on a modern wristwatch dial.

The persistence of celestial themes across such a wide range of price points and complexity levels - from purely decorative moon phases to genuinely space-engineered pieces - speaks to something durable in watchmaking's own self-mythology: an industry that has always positioned precise timekeeping as a kind of small-scale mastery over cosmic, otherwise uncontrollable forces.