Patek Philippe is not a brand that surprises easily. Its vocabulary – restrained cases, classical complications, meticulous finishing – has been consistent for decades, and departures from it tend to register as events. The Celestial Sunrise and Sunset ref. 6105G, unveiled at Watches & Wonders 2026, is very much one of those events.
The headline complication is significant on its own terms. The Celestial line has depicted the night sky above Geneva since 2002, layering a rotating star chart with lunar phases and orbit display. But until now, Patek Philippe had never produced a wristwatch with sunrise and sunset indications – despite the complications appearing in legendary pocket watches including those made for James Ward Packard in 1927 and Henry Graves Jr. in 1933. The 6105G finally closes that gap, and does so with a solution that goes a step further: for the first time, the sunrise and sunset times can be corrected for daylight saving time with a simple push of a case corrector, eliminating the mental arithmetic that other watches in this category have always required.
The dial carries the full astronomical program. A sapphire disc carrying the star chart rotates once in 23 hours and 56 minutes – sidereal time – with the Milky Way printed on its reverse side to add depth to the display. A second sapphire disc, coated in black PVD and mounted on an aluminium wheel, tracks the moon’s rotation in 24 hours and 50 minutes, with a cutaway revealing a mineral crystal disc beneath that reproduces the lunar phases. This mechanism deviates by just one day every 3,000 years. The date scale at the periphery does double duty, serving not only as a calendar but as the scale against which both sunrise and sunset times are read – a clever piece of functional integration that keeps the dial from becoming illegible.
The movement behind all of this took more than five years to develop. The Caliber 240 C LU CL LCSO adds 121 components to the base micro-rotor movement, arriving at a total of 426 parts within a thickness of just 7.93mm, alongside six pending patents covering the sunrise and sunset rack mechanism, the daylight saving time management system, and several innovations in the crown and winding architecture. That the result remains under 8mm thick is an achievement worth pausing on.
The case is where the 6105G becomes genuinely surprising. At 47mm, it is considerably larger than its predecessor the ref. 6102, and arrives with no traditional lugs – the integrated black composite strap feeds directly into the case middle, giving it the ergonomic profile of a sports watch rather than a grand complication. The flanks of the case carry an X-shaped relief pattern that Thierry Stern drew from the tubular structure of space modules and satellites, a design language that continues onto the strap and caseback. Opinions on whether this aesthetic belongs in Patek Philippe’s portfolio have varied sharply among collectors and critics, which is itself telling – the brand rarely provokes that kind of debate.
Despite the size, the absence of lugs gives the 6105G a smaller effective footprint on the wrist, and most who have worn it report that it sits better than the dimensions suggest, though the weight of the white gold case makes itself known.
The price is CHF 350,000, or approximately $437,000 in the US market. That places it squarely in the territory of what Patek Philippe calls a “pass it on to the next generation” purchase – which may be exactly the right framing for a watch that took over five years to engineer and carries complications last seen, in wearable form, on nothing that existed before. The 6105G is not a watch for every collector. But as a demonstration of what this brand can do when it decides to move, it is difficult to argue with. And don’t forget to check our list of the most expensive watches.
