Moonphase Complication Correctly Displays Lunar Cycle; Owner Still Confused by Phases of the Moon

A moonphase complication, re-indexed and returned from Silas Tilling's bench this week, was confirmed to be displaying the current lunar age to within a quarter of a day; its owner told this paper he had never once gone outside to check.

The watch, a Corvid & Lund Ref. 72 with a perpetual moon disc, arrived at the shop with a service sheet that read, in the owner's hand, "moon wrong." Edwin Marsh, 51, had been comparing the disc against a photograph on his phone. "It didn't match," he said. "So it was wrong."

The disc was not wrong. It had a 59-tooth wheel under the dial advancing one notch per day, which is the correct tooth count for a 29.5-day cycle, and Tilling's bench compared its position against a lunar almanac before the caseback ever came off. The photograph, it turned out, had been taken the previous evening, from a different window, in different weather. Malika's Bench Notes logged the entry as: disc within tolerance, client reference out of tolerance.

What does the moon look like tonight, Mr. Marsh? "I'd have to check the watch."

That is the trouble with owning the answer to a question you have declined to ask. Marsh bought the Ref. 72, he said, because it was "the most complication I could get at the money," and he listed them the way other people list mileage: moon, date, power reserve. Asked to point at the moon from the shop's doorway, a request that costs nothing and requires no equipment, he looked at the sky the way a person looks at an unfamiliar menu, then back at his wrist, then at Tilling, who had not moved.

It got worse before it got better. Two days later Marsh brought the watch back. Having recently changed the clocks, he had re-set the moon disc by an hour as well, on the theory that the moon also observes the changeover. It did not. The disc, which had left the bench correct, was now a full day behind the actual moon, and Marsh had done it himself, carefully, with a tool he owns. Re-indexing took four minutes. The log entry was less kind: client-side correction, unrequested.

Basil Keene's collecting group held a lunar observing evening on Thursday, and Marsh attended, watch on, disc correct, and could not locate the moon for the first twenty minutes of the session, which had been scheduled around it. Inez Bellamy, who left that group in protest several years ago and has not missed a meeting since, supplied the observation from the back row. "The moon is a complication," she said. "It's the only one that doesn't need a service."

Tilling was asked whether the watch had been accurate before Marsh got involved. "The watch has been accurate every day I've had it on the bench," he said. "It's had three days of him."

Marsh is learning the phases, he says. He has purchased a chart. The chart is on the wall of his office, at eye level, behind the desk where he spends the hours in which the moon is, technically, doing something. He can name four of the eight phases in order and has been known to reverse two of them. He has offered to demonstrate the complication for anyone who asks, which he does, frequently, at the door of the shop, pointing the dial at the sky as though introducing two parties who ought to know each other.

The disc, meanwhile, keeps its own counsel. It is correct. It was correct when it left, correct when he changed it, and correct again now, and it will be correct through the chart, the office, and the observing evening at which nobody looked down.