Reading the face
The whole watch in four ideas – with the full walkthrough a link away.
The basics#
The Earth map is the clock. The map, centered on the North Pole, turns counterclockwise once per day – the same way the Earth itself turns, seen from above the pole. Read against the 24-hour ring, that makes the face a world clock: you can see roughly what time it is everywhere at once.
The hour hand is your meridian. It marks the central longitude of your time zone, and doubles as a rough compass: align the face with anything you recognize in the sky and the red side of the hand points north, the white side south. The point where the colors meet is meant to be set to your latitude – on the watch, under Settings → "Hand Color Split".
The sky turns above it. The star map makes one slow clockwise turn per year, which keeps the Sun pinned at the top: noon at the top, midnight at the bottom, morning on the right, evening on the left.
The ecliptic ring carries the Solar System. The Moon and planets sit on it at their true angles from the Sun, so if you can find one object in the sky, the face shows you where everything else is – above or below the horizon.
That is the whole face. For the complete, visualized walkthrough of every convention – the counterclockwise map, the projection, the sky map, the ecliptic, the horizon shapes, and the astronomy behind them – see the concept. For the deep dives, there are the astronomy and history articles.