Thursday 14 August 2014

Citizen Deep Impact watch

When I bought today's watch, I knew it was a limited edition but not what it was for. After a bit of research, I worked it out, and would definitely have never guessed.

The watch is by the Japanese watch giant Citizen, and is quite a formal looking chronograph watch. It has a rounded square case and face in silver and white/silver, and has a plain black leather strap. It has a 3 hand dial, 3 small dials, and a date marker window arranged on the face for the combination of time and timing. For the time, it is 2 hands on the main dial that are used, with the main dial seconds hand functioning for the chronograph while the bottom small dial provides the seconds (or 1/10th seconds when the chronograph is started). The other two small dials are also for the chronograph giving the minutes and hours.

Inside is a Japanese Citizen 0560 module,  which seems quite a high tech design, and the model number is 0560-S033365.
The watch was cased in China, and is 5 bar water resistant.

On the dial, the watch has the name Deep Impact, which makes it sound like it is a special edition for the space mission or the movie, and the date of 2005 on the back fits with the NASA mission. It's only the tiny writing saying Triple Crown and the engraving of a horse on the back that gave the real answer. There are several lines of Japanese text on the back too, but I don't know what that really says yet. 
The research on this revealed that the watch is a special edition for the Japanese champion racehorse Deep Impact. Deep Impact was a successful racehorse in the 2000s, winning 7 Japanese domestic races during 2005 and 2006. Its biggest known achievement was in 2005 when it became the first racehorse for 11 years to win the Japanese Triple Crown (Satsuki Sho, Tokyo Yushun, and Kikuka Sho), and that is what this watch was released for. Deep Impact was retired to Stud in 2006 and is one of Japan's leading sires, fathering at least 12 race-winning horses.

As the name on the face is directly printed, and the back is unique to the watch (having none of the normal serial numbers), it looks like this was a direct release by Citizen rather than a 3rd party modification. As there is no serial number, it is hard to conclude on how many were released, but I wouldn't expect there to be a large market for high quality horseracing commemorative watches which are a domestic Japanese release only!

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