Out on newsstands now, the WOW Fall issue is a meditation on the passage of time itself, with a focus on how wristwatches represent the philosophical side of things. Issue 46 presents time as a game where the pieces advance inexorably – no retreat is possible. Our cover watch, the A. Lange & Söhne Lange 1 Moon Phase reminds us of this, and also of the steady progress of the present-day Glashütte brand. The connective tissue linking this brand’s heritage with its current reality is something that one can readily see in its 2017 watches.

That said, contemporary watchmaking is defined by both its past and its possible future. In issue 46, we look at both aspects to see if there are indeed threads that connect them. After all, horology began with charting the skies, deliberately and methodically tracking the motion of celestial bodies before it moved to measuring the passing of hours and minutes. Today we know that the motion of our minutes and hours represents the motion of our own celestial body – the Earth – so tracking the heavens and tracking the time is really the same thing.

Our issue presents the best in astronomical timepieces, from major complications in the form of the legendary Sky Moon Tourbillon to relatively simple watches honouring the anniversary of the geophysical year of 1957. At the same time, we use the recently passed solar eclipse as inspiration for an illuminating spread that casts a few of our favourite wristwatches as planetary bodies.

The body of knowledge that impacts on watchmaking is especially intriguing to us. Our extensive story on the innovations shaping contemporary watchmaking takes stock of recent changes and looks at possible futures, some of which will give collectors pause. Indeed, this story and its extended look into material sciences also reveals just how much more educated you, the audience, has become in the last 20 years – most of the information we include can be found via no less than Wikipedia! Hopefully, we will have added just a smidgen of our own thoughts to this body of research.

Editor of WOW, Ashok Soman says, “We are often pressed about trends every year, with the 2017 fairs firmly in the rear view mirror, but developments in watchmaking are decades in the making. Hopefully, the stories in this issue serve to remind us all that we are in this for the long haul.”

Jonathan Ho, Associate Editor of WOW, and Managing Editor of Luxuo.com ponders, “Watchmaking is a very artisanal craft with roots in astronomical sciences precisely because our position in the cosmos governs how we perceive time’s passage. In the digital age, time is defined more precisely of course – if you found this story via a search then it was the result of tens of thousands of processes happening in one second. Paradoxically, even traditional watchmaking partakes of this digital revolution, as we see in the issue”