Of course, this watch’s visual beauty was surely taken into consideration as much as its timekeeping duties, and a large rotor, as one would find in a self-winding caliber, would most likely have been a detriment to the view of the decorated movement parts. I’ll admit, after several months of reviewing automatic watches, the convenience of not needing to wind a timepiece daily was missed at times, though the watch was very easy to wind and kept time very accurately even after more than a day and a half of being idle. The movement holds a 48-hour power reserve when fully wound it has no stop-seconds function but does incorporate a decoupling mechanism that prevents the mainspring from being overwound. This version of the legendary Moonwatch movement has been dubbed Caliber 1869, in honor of 1969, the year of the moon landing - though one wonders why Omega didn’t just change the “8” in the reference number as well, just to make the tribute more obvious. Of course, the movement is also the first of its kind to be skeletonized and enhanced with the laser-ablation finishing. Omega has dubbed this version of the Moonwatch’s movement Caliber 1869 in tribute to the year of the moon landing. That said, it is possible that the watch, like some other chronographs, was designed to emphasize the stopwatch functions over the reading of the current time - and of course, the luminous tachymeter scale attests to that as well, allowing the wearer to time racing speeds even in the dark if he wishes. I would have thought these hands would be at least as wide as the indices on which they indicated the time. However, the relative thinness of the hour and minute hands - thin enough, in fact, to occasionally get a bit lost among the background details, and at times even obscured by the much more noticeable central seconds hand - was somewhat unexpected. The motion of the running seconds at 9 o’clock is also fairly obvious at a glance, allowing the wearer to check whether the watch is running - an important feature in a manually winding watch. The white hour indices and especially the prominent yellow chronograph seconds hand are easy to discern in all lighting conditions. Legibility-wise, the effect of all this detail is a mixed bag. The decorated elements on the back of the movement represent the moon’s “dark side.” However, as I realized after having the chance to spend two weeks with this timepiece, my personal favorite of Omega’s 2018 lineup, the skeletonization is just the tip of the aesthetic iceberg. The watch is, most notably, the first Speedmaster Moonwatch to contain a skeletonized version of the watch’s storied movement, Caliber 1861. It paved the way for the more famous Apollo 11 mission in 1969, which first landed men on the Moon and from which the Omega Speedmaster, the watch worn by those men on the lunar surface, earned its enduring “Moonwatch” nickname. That mission was the second manned spaceflight launched by the United States and the first to leave Earth’s orbit, reach and orbit the Moon, and return safely to Earth. In 2018, a year in which Omega devoted much of its marketing muscle not to the Speedmaster but to its dive-watch predecessor, the Seamaster, there was among the flood of Seamasters one very notable return to the Dark Side: the Speedmaster Dark Side of the Moon Apollo 8, a tribute to the historic 1968 lunar mission that marks its 50 th anniversary in 2018. The Omega Speedmaster Dark Side of the Moon Apollo 8 features the collection’s first skeleton movement.
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