Pre-Owned Picks: Blue Moon (Phase), You Saw Me Standing Alone
Dividing time into days, watching the sun rise and set, and endlessly repeating the process is the simplest way to track the passage of time. When humans started to create calendars and record time on a longer scale, they looked to the second largest heavenly body, the Moon. The Moon will travel around Earth every 29.53059 days, waxing and waning as the Moon’s angle towards the sun changes. This nearly month-long timing of phases of the Moon was the basis for most early calendars, and it allowed for proper timing of when to plant crops or measuring how long until the weather changed. The importance of this made the moonphase one of the earliest complications in watchmaking, going as far back as the Antikythera mechanism from ancient Greece, over two thousand years ago.
Today the moonphase complication is more of an aesthetic choice, as most of humanity has moved on to solar calendars. It’s a nice way to add a little whimsy with a face on the moon or to add some color to a watch face. At the very least, a moonphase will let you know if it is going to be a full moon during Halloween.