Watches and Wonders 2026: every watchmaker that romanticised the cosmos—and made it a celebration at the Geneva fair this year

To understand why this watch matters, you need to know what it took to get here. The display of sunrise and sunset times has existed in Patek Philippe’s universe since 1927, when the manufacture built an ultra-complicated pocket watch for American industrialist James Ward Packard. It appeared again in 1933 for Henry Graves Jr, then in the 33-complication Calibre 89 of 1989, and in the Star Calibre 2000. In nearly a century, Patek Philippe never put it in a wristwatch, at least not until now.

The 6105G is five years in development and six patents deep, which gives you some sense of why it took this long. The challenge was not simply displaying when the sun rises and sets in Geneva—it was doing so accurately across the entire year while also allowing the owner to correct for summer and winter time without throwing every other astronomical indication out of alignment. The solution is a patented corrector system at nine and 10 o’clock: a single press adjusts the hour hand, the date disk and the sunrise-sunset scales simultaneously. Three actions, one push. The sunrise and sunset times themselves are driven by two ovoid cams that rotate once per year, their contours geometrically reflecting the tilt of the earth’s axis as it shifts across the seasons—a mechanism so precise it reads via a feeler-spindle just 0.48mm thin.

Beneath the sapphire crystal dial, three superposed transparent disks track the celestial vault on a sidereal day cycle of 23 hours, 56 minutes and four seconds, the lunar day at 24 hours, 50 minutes, and the moon phases with an accuracy requiring correction only once every 3,000 years. The new calibre 240 C LU CL LCSO houses all of this in a movement just 7.93mm tall despite its 426 parts—a number that increases by 121 over the previous Celestial calibre. The 47 mm white gold case, with its X-shaped motif drawn from the tubular geometry of space modules, signals that Patek Philippe is not interested in making this watch look like anything else in its catalogue, and is successful in doing so. For a manufacture that treats paired-back designs as a virtue, the 6105G is a rare and deliberate act of ambition.

A Lange & Söhne was relaunched in the mid‑1990s after decades of dormancy under the East German regime, and in the years since, the Saxon manufacture has built its reputation on two pillars: the quality of its movements and the rigorous logic of its dials. If you’re a Lange loyalist, you know that on these watches, every display earns its place, every hand its position and nothing is arranged arbitrarily. The Lange 1 layout—with its outsize date and asymmetric subsidiary dial organised with the deliberateness of a typographer—has become one of the most recognisable dial compositions in the industry.

The Lange 1 Tourbillon Perpetual Calendar “Lumen” takes that canvas and asks a question Lange had not quite answered before: what does it look like in the dark? The answer required developing an entirely new luminous moonphase display with an integrated day/night indication, a first for the manufacture and the detail that gives this watch its name and its reason for being. The moonphase on a Lange perpetual calendar is a functional anchor of the display and makes it legible in darkness without compromising its precision in light is a problem worth solving. Every other indication follows suit: the outsize date, the retrograde day‑of‑week and the leap‑year display are all luminous, all switching instantaneously with the satisfying snap that Lange has made a signature.

The displays are arranged in an isosceles‑triangle‑like composition that sounds like an indulgence until you realise it is the reason the dial remains readable despite carrying two grand complications—a tourbillon with stop seconds and a perpetual calendar with peripheral month ring—in a case of just 41.9 mm. The calibre L225.1 is visible through both the semi‑transparent sapphire dial and the open caseback. The watch is limited to 50 pieces and is made in platinum. Lange does not make watches like this often, and when it does, it tends to make exactly as many as it wants to.

Don’t miss: Watches and Wonders 2026: Hublot celebrates the Unico, its first in-house chronograph

When IWC first put ceramic in a watch case back in 1986, the industry thought it an odd detour. Forty years later, that detour has produced Ceralume—a luminous ceramic that absorbs light and re-emits it for more than 24 hours, turning the entire watch into a glowing object in the dark. The case, the dial, the strap: all of it lit from within in an intense blue, the hands and numerals appearing as dark shadows against the luminous ground rather than the other way around. It is a striking inversion of how watches normally behave in low light, and it did not come easily. Blending ceramic powders with Super-LumiNova pigments sounds simple until you discover that the two materials have incompatible particle sizes and resist mixing uniformly—a problem IWC’s engineering division XPL solved only by designing a dedicated ball-milling process.

In daylight the 46.5mm case is a quieter proposition: varying shades of white and grey, matte against polished, numerals printed in a subtly different tone on the dial. The complication underneath all of this is Kurt Klaus’s perpetual calendar from the 1980s, which remains one of the most legible in the industry—four subdials, a four-digit year display, and IWC’s Double Moon showing the lunar phase as seen from both hemispheres, deviating by one day every 577.5 years. Even the “Probus Scafusia” medallion on the rotor—IWC’s Latin motto meaning “honestly made in Schaffhausen,” engraved on every mechanical watch the manufacture produces—has been made in Super-LumiNova. It is a detail most owners will only discover by removing the caseback, which makes it the most honest expression of how fully IWC has committed to this concept. The watch is limited to 250 pieces.

Bremont was founded in 2002 by brothers Nick and Giles English with a straightforward and demanding proposition: that a watch should earn its place in the environments it claims to inhabit. That meant ejector-seat testing, deep-sea exposure, polar expeditions—proof of utility, in other words, rather than suggestion. It is worth holding that founding principle in mind when considering what the Supernova Chronograph is actually about to do, because this is not just a watch with a space theme. This summer, a Bremont Supernova Chronograph will be integrated into the chassis of Astrolab’s Flip rover—the Flex Lunar Innovation Platform—when it touches down near the lunar south pole, where it will remain on the lunar surface permanently, with no intention of retrieval and no means of transmitting data, running until it runs no more.

Before it could get anywhere near a rocket, the watch was subjected to Spacecraft Protoflight Qualification alongside the rover itself—a testing programme built on a single philosophy, “test like you fly”. Every test in the Spacecraft Protoflight Qualification programme—thermal vacuum exposure, random vibration, acoustic testing, electromagnetic compatibility and self-generated shock simulation—was run at levels deliberately exceeding worst-case mission conditions, and the Supernova cleared all of them, which matters when you consider what it is heading into: a place where temperatures swing from near absolute zero in permanent shadow to scorching heat in direct sunlight, with no atmosphere to mediate either extreme and no possibility of bringing the watch back if something goes wrong.

The watch itself is a 41 mm integrated bracelet chronograph in 904L stainless steel, with a decahedral black ceramic bezel and a case architecture drawn from the geometric language of spacecraft design. The dial takes its structure from spacecraft solar arrays—an interlocking black galvanic perforated grid set over a full Super-LumiNova layer—and at its heart is the chronometer-rated BC77 movement with a 62-hour power reserve. It is Bremont’s most technically and aesthetically contemporary watch to date, which feels appropriate given where it is going. 

NOW READ

Opinion: Rolex just launched a new Jubilee Gold bracelet at Watches and Wonders 2026 and we have a theory about what the brand is really doing

Five new Patek Philippe releases from Watches and Wonders Geneva that deserve your full attention—anniversary or not

Watches and Wonders 2026: Top 6 highlights from Cartier