Dutch Brand Christiaan Van Der Klaauw (CVDK) has made quite a name for itself with its astronomy-inspired watches over the years. Just last year, it won the prize for best Calendar and Astronomy Watch at the GPHG with the Planetarium Eise Eisinga. While that watch featured a dial that resembled the blue-painted ceiling of the Eise Eisinga planetarium in Franeker, Netherlands, the oldest working orrery in the world, this latest edition pays tribute to Mars.

The Planetarium Dunes of Mars does so by a dial that is made from red aventurine. This manufactured glass-like material is not uncommonly used in watchmaking, but it is primarily blue. In this color, it resembles the night sky, but in red, it gets a different character. With a grainy look, in which you see flashes of gold as light hits the dial, it resembles red sand. This makes the name of the watch, Dunes of Mars, very appropriate.
A sense of depth is created by the CVDK logo at twelve o’clock, flanked on each side by three roman numerals that all lie on top of the dial. In between, there is a subdial that indicates the date and the month. This also sits on top of the dial, just like the planetarium, which gets center stage at the bottom half of the dial. It is the smallest of its kind in the world and shows the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn around the Sun. As you see Mercury making more than three complete rounds in a year, it takes Saturn 29.46 years to go around just o...