Apollo 8 Dark Side of the Moon

Baco Noir

This is a watch I had been looking at since it came out in 2018 on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission. I saw it again after losing my father last year, and when I saw the etched saying on the caseback of “we’ll see you on the other side”, I knew this was a watch I could buy to memorialize his loss.


I’ve always liked the idea of a ceramic case watch since I “wear” my watches and am not one to baby them. Mine get scratches. I tried on several of the other Dark side models with the automatic movements, and wasn’t a fan of how thick they were. The case is 44.25mm in diameter, with 21mm lug width, 49mm lug to lug, and 12mm thick.

This comes on a perforated strap with a tang buckle, but I special ordered a deployant clasp and strap too. I’ve seen the pictures of damaged ceramic cases, and I didn’t want to become one of those statistics. Plus, straps on deployant clasps tend to last longer since they do not get bent as much taking the watches on and off.



This model uses the Calibre 1869 movement, which is a specially decorated version of the 1861 movement. It’s a manual wind, non-hacking movement with 48 hour power reserve. To set the time, you can rotate their crown towards 12 to stop the second hand. When It’s fully wound, you feel the crown tension increase and then stop. It has a 30 minute subdial at 3 o’clock, 12 hour counter at 6 and the second hand at 9.



The surface of the plates have been laser ablated to texture the plates with an image of the moon surface, and the subdials are floated over the movement to generate somewhat of a skeltonized look. When you use the chrono pushers, you can see the activation of the chronograph between the 7 and 8 o’clock position on the dial.

The front side of the dial is the lunar surface we see from earth and the back side is what the astronauts saw on the dark side. As I said earlier, the backside of the case is engraved with “we’ll see you on the other side” which is what Jim Lovell said as they went behind the moon and lost contact with mission control. I was 6 years old when this happened and remember sitting in silence with my parents and siblings and barely breathing wondering if they would reappear when they were supposed to.



The lume on the watch is great with the hands, hour markers, bezel, and crown logo all applied with lume.

That’s it for now. I’ll come back and give some other impressions after I’ve worn it for a while.

Evitzee

The Apollo 8 is underappreciated, imo. The first version is a relative bargain compared to the 'new and improved', and more expensive, current model.

Mute

Got one as well and it's a fantastic watch overall. In spite of the larger case size, it wears surprisingly slim. Biggest pros of the watch for me:

- beautiful dial and all the details
- lume on the bezel and the crown
- light weight of the ceramic case

Biggest cons:
- the minute and hour hands are difficult to pickup quickly because they're slim and very similar to all the other elements on the dial
- I worry about hard hits on a ceramic case