I found this stuck in some corner of the internet and thought I'd share it here. A beautiful movement.
Its real time vs legal time. Basically real time would be exactly noon when the Sun hits zenith, but a hair more complicated as it is affected by our position around the sun.. Usefull for astronomers, and still available as a complication on certain high end watches. Seriously cool piece.
That piece as presented raises all these questions: How big is it? How and where was it mounted? Who would find that useful? Could local sidereal time vary from local civil time to that degree?
Well, I answered at least one of my questions. Local sidereal time and local civil time can vary by a great degree. in my location @ 81.88 W the local civil time is 1611 the local sidereal time is 2243. http://www.jgiesen.de/astro/astroJS/siderealClock/
The symmetry, my God, the symmetry! Has my CDO inflamed! (compulsive disorder with obsession, in alphabetic order, the way it should be!)
Top crown for winding each barrel via flip flop lever thingy? Top diagonal crowns for time setting? Bottom crowns for hacking/stopping? Any more analysis? I WANT one!
I could get sick from staring at that too long here. It's funny that it runs off of one escapement yet both halves are serial numbered individually, sequentially. It is so cool.
I think several parts were actually first made as (or at least were designed to be) parts of individual movements and were put together afterwards with the necessary modification. That would explain the two serial numbers and the "10 jewels" on the movement of the right, which does not correspond neither to the number of jewels of the whole movement nor to the current number of jewels of that "half" movement. It is still a strange number though and not one you usually see on a complete movement... It is to be noticed that the plates of the two half movements have the same number that the half movement... But they are the same plate! So this plate has two serial numbers. So a very nice and uncommon find!