Sky-Dweller

The Sky-Dweller is Rolex's travel watch with an annual calendar. Introduced in 2012, it combines local time, a second time zone, the date and the month. It is more complicated than the GMT-Master II, but it still uses a crown and a rotating bezel rather than a row of small calendar pushers.

The main hands show local time. An off-center disc turns once every twenty-four hours beneath a fixed red triangle, giving a second time reference and distinguishing morning from evening. The local hour can be changed independently when crossing time zones.

The month display is less obvious. Twelve small windows sit outside the hour markers. One turns red: at one o'clock it means January, at two February, and so on. The same dial that marks twelve hours also marks twelve months.

Rolex calls the annual calendar Saros. It distinguishes thirty-day from thirty-one-day months, so a running, correctly set watch needs a calendar correction only at the end of February. It is not a perpetual calendar; it does not make that final correction for itself.

The fluted bezel is part of the controls. Turning it selects the function to be adjusted, and the crown makes the change. Rolex calls this Ring Command. The bezel looks related to the Datejust's, but here it has an additional mechanical job.

The steel-and-white-gold 326934 brought this system to white Rolesor in 2017. The 336934 succeeded it in 2023 with calibre 9002, adding newer movement technology while retaining the same display and operating principle. The visible design did not need a new arrangement to accommodate the revised mechanism.