Baselworld/SIHH

PANERAI Jupiterium

 

With a world preview at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, at the exhibition “Galileo’s Telescope - The Instrument that Changed the World”, the Panerai Jupiterium is a planetarium-clock with perpetual calendar that, depending on the geocentric point of view, shows the positions of the Sun, Moon and Jupiter with the so-called Medicean planets, namely the planet’s four main satellites, observed for the first time by Galileo Galilei in 1610 thanks to his invention the telescope and today known as Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

Based on the terrestrial observation point, the Panerai Jupiterium has the Earth at the centre of the blue sphere and the other celestial bodies move around it. This scenario is enclosed in a glass box, 75 cm wide and 86 cm tall, resting on a Mahogany wood base into which the clock itself is set together with the complex gear train that powers the planetarium.

Inside the glass, a transparent globe represents the heavenly skies, made up of two semi spheres that depict the austral and boreal hemispheres,joined by a fine band that symbolises the earthly equator, onto which are engraved the 12 signs of the zodiac. The semi spheres are studded with the constellations, the stars picked out in Super-LumiNova® so that they shine at the night like real ones. The night sky is mobile to represent the way the stars seem to move to an observer on the

Earth and makes one revolution every 23 hours and 56 minutes, in other words a sidereal day.

Powered by a movement that is regulated by that of the clock, all the heavenly bodies apart from the Earth, rotate inside the blue sphere, completing their orbits in real time: the Moon rotates around the Earth in 27.32 days; the Sun completes one circuit in 365.26 days; Jupiter moves around the Sun in 11.87 years, while its satellites complete their orbits in 1.8 (Io), 3.6 (Europa), 7.2 (Callisto) and 16.7 days (Ganymede).

At the base of the complex system of staffs and counterweights that balance and support the planets, there is a circular sector with four little windows showing the perpetual calendar: day, date, month and year. This perpetual calendar will require no correction until 2100, one of those years that, although in theory a leap year, will actually not have the extra day, in this way allowing the tiny discrepancies of the Gregorian calendar to be corrected.

Underneath the sphere, on the Mahogany wood base, there is the clock dial. In typical Panerai style, this has a black base, with long stick hour markers and two large Arabic numerals at 12 and 6 o’clock, as highly luminescent as the hands. In addition to the hours, minutes and seconds, the dial also shows am/pm and remaining power reserve; this manual-wound clock in fact has an autonomy of 40 days.

Most of the 1476 parts of the Panerai Jupiterium are in titanium and it has a total weight of 110kg. It is an unprecedented article, with a level of mechanical complication that is yet further proof of the technical skill of Officine Panerai, which with this extraordinary clock-planetarium pays homage to the founder of modern science and to the man who with his laws on the pendulum blazed a trail for precision watch-making.