Vintage Moonwatch

The Speedmaster 145.022 is a steel watch with a stopwatch, a black face and three small counters. It arrived in 1968, just before the first Moon landing, and retained the broad 42 mm case of the preceding Professional. From the front, the change could be difficult to spot. Inside, Omega had replaced the calibre 321 with a new hand-wound movement, the 861.

The operating layout stayed familiar. The upper button starts and stops the long central stopwatch hand; the lower one resets it. Two small counters collect the minutes and hours of an event, while the little hand at nine shows ordinary running seconds. The numbered ring around the face is a tachymeter, used to calculate speed from the elapsed time over a known distance.

What changed was the mechanism connecting those controls. The 321 used a small castellated wheel to coordinate the stopwatch's actions. The 861 used a cam system instead. The pushers still asked the watch to do the same jobs, but the internal arrangement was different. The 145.022 belongs to the Moonwatch family without having the movement used by the earlier lunar-surface Speedmasters.

Its long production run also covers visible changes. Early examples could retain an applied metal Omega logo and a dial with a distinct step down to the outer minute track. Later ones used a printed logo, and the dial treatment changed over time. The small dot above ninety on some early timing rings moved beside the numeral on later ones. A 145.022 is therefore not a single unchanging set of parts.

The case remained asymmetrical, with extra steel around the crown and buttons, and the front cover was domed acrylic. Those broad features give the reference continuity. The logo, dial edge and tiny printed dot tell the more detailed story of how a familiar watch was revised while staying recognisably in production.