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Six first-place awards and two world records. That was Omega’s tally at the observatory chronometer trials between 1933 and 1952, contests where Swiss houses sent movements to Kew-Teddington and the Geneva Observatory to run for weeks against each other. Those results lived on paper, in tables no customer would ever see. So Omega built a watch to carry the record out of the laboratory, called it the Constellation, and struck the score into a medallion on the caseback: an observatory beneath eight stars, one for each result.
This Omega Constellation 2852-9 SC is that idea in its best years. It left the factory in the back half of the 1950s, and by the summer of 1960 it belonged to someone who mattered to someone else, because the caseback is engraved TO MY HON above a date. We know nothing more about either of them, and we would not want to. What it tells us is that this watch spent its first decade being worn as a gift rather than kept as an artifact, which goes a long way toward explaining the state it is in now.
The calibre 505 is what earns the word on the dial. It is a 24-jewel automatic from Omega’s 500 series, the larger full-rotor platform that arrived after the 470 and 471 generation of the mid-1950s, and it is chronometer grade rather than a standard movement wearing a good dial. The rotor is marked for adjustment to five positions and temperatures and for its twenty-four jewels, and the dial spells chronometer the French way, as period Omega dials do alongside the English spelling.
What seventy years did here needs saying plainly. The dial is heavily spotted, a dense freckling that runs across the flat centre and out over the sloped rim, and the applied markers and dauphine hands have darkened along with it. A prominent diagonal scratch crosses the acrylic crystal. The 35mm case wears its scratches and softened edges in plain view, whether from polishing or from long use, and the bracelet is stretched and rubbed from decades of use. None of it is disguised and the dial has not been refinished, which is the trade we will make every time on a Constellation this old.
Underneath the patina the watch is exactly what it claims to be. The case is 14k gold capped over steel, never solid gold, with a stainless back stamped ACIER INOXYDABLE and the observatory medallion on its face. The dial is the twelve-faceted pie-pan that gives these their nickname, flat across the middle with the outer edge turned down toward the rim, carrying applied markers, Arabic numerals at twelve, three, six and nine, and no lume on the dial or the hands.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our 2-year mechanical warranty, it comes on an Omega-signed gold and silver expansion bracelet in 14k gold filled and stainless steel, a period-style American-made piece rather than a factory original to this watch. Eight stars, six wins, two records, and one person in 1960 who decided somebody deserved all of it.
