The Automatique Lune is the version where F.P. Journe took the time back to the middle of the dial. Its predecessor, the Octa Lune of 2004, had displaced the hours and minutes onto a small subdial off to one side, which made room for a large date, a moon and a power reserve but produced a face that had to be deciphered rather than read. In 2007 Journe eliminated the off-centered subdial entirely and rebuilt the layout around central hands, keeping the large date, the small seconds at 4:30, the power reserve at 9 o'clock and the moon phase in place. The result is cleaner, considerably more legible, and far more classical. This platinum version pairs it with a white gold dial whose numerals are surfaced with a diamond tool. It ran in this form until 2018.
Moving the hands back to the middle changes the problem the dial has to solve. On the off-centered layout every indication was arranged around a displaced block of time, and the composition worked by asymmetry; here the hands sweep the full width of the face and everything else has to coexist underneath them without being obscured at any point in the twelve hours. Journe solved it by keeping the subsidiary displays small and pushing them outward toward the edge of the dial: small seconds sit at 4:30, the power reserve occupies 9 o'clock, the date aperture is placed where the hands cross it least often, and the moon sits well clear of the sweep. The dial is white gold, and its hour numerals are worked with a diamond tool rather than printed or applied, cutting a fine directional grain into the metal so the figures take light along one axis while the plate behind them takes it along another. The case is 950 platinum at 40 mm and stands 10.6 mm tall, with a sapphire crystal in the back showing the movement. It is much the more formal of the two Lune architectures and makes no attempt to disguise the fact. Where the earlier layout announced itself, this one asks to be taken seriously instead.
The winding system is the reason this movement exists in the form it does, and it took three years to arrive at. Journe wanted an automatic that could run a large date, a moon and a reserve indication without the rate falling away as the mainspring unwound, which required a barrel considerably larger than a conventional automatic carries. A barrel that size needs feeding, and a conventional centrally pivoted rotor was simply not efficient enough to keep it wound from the movement of an ordinary day. His solution was to displace the rotor off-center, run it in one direction only on a self-locking ball bearing, and cast it in 22K gold so a physically smaller mass would still deliver the inertia required. That arrangement takes roughly 274 counter-clockwise turns of the rotor to cover a full day of running, which is efficient enough that ordinary wear keeps the watch near a full wind. The resulting calibre 1300.3 measures 30.80 mm across, runs in 36 jewels at 21,600 alternations per hour with a 10.1 mm balance, and carries plates and bridges cut from 18K rose gold rather than brass. Autonomy reaches about 160 hours in total, with the first 120 underwritten as chronometric, which is the figure that describes how the watch actually behaves rather than the point at which it finally stops.
Three watches in this catalog share that calibre and that set of complications, and the differences between them are entirely a matter of how the dial is organized. The Lune, reference LN, keeps the off-centered time display inherited from the original Octa Lune and reads asymmetrically. The Divine puts the hands in the center of the dial, over an engine-turned field with applied numerals ranged around the outer edge. This Automatique Lune, reference AL, also centralizes the hands but arrives at that arrangement from a completely different direction, replacing an off-centered subdial that it once had rather than never having carried one at all, and its dial is a gold plate with worked numerals rather than a guilloche surface carrying applied ones. Journe has run all three concurrently at various points in the catalog's history, which tells you plainly enough that he regarded them as genuinely different watches rather than as one design offered in several dresses. This one occupied the middle position of the three, more legible than the Lune and less decorative than the Divine, and it ran in the Octa collection from 2007 until 2018 before being withdrawn. Eleven years is a long production life for a reference in a catalog this small.
This suits the collector who wants the full Octa complication set without the difficulty that the off-centered dial imposes on reading it. It is the most straightforwardly usable of the three, and a white gold dial in a platinum case is the coolest and most severe combination the reference was offered in, which sharpens that character rather than softening it. Nothing about the watch is trying to charm anybody. The reference has been withdrawn, so the market is the only route, and pre-owned Automatique Lunes are not especially scarce by the standards of this manufacture, which makes it possible to be selective about condition. Watch the date change at midnight to confirm that both discs jump together and instantaneously rather than dragging into position, run the reserve down far enough to watch the indication behave across the full length of its scale, and advance the moon through a complete cycle to check the train. Inspect the diamond-tooled numerals under raking light as well, since that graining is destroyed by any refinishing and cannot afterward be recovered by anybody, including the manufacture.
