The astronomical clock in Besancon Cathedral

The astronomical clock in Besançon Cathedral, France.

The astronomical clock of Besançon is housed in Besançon Cathedral. Auguste-Lucien Vérité designed and built Besançon's present astronomical clock, between 1858 and 1863. It replaced an earlier and unsatisfactory clock made by Bernardin in the 1850s. It differs from those in Strasbourg, Lyon and Beauvais. The clock is meant to express the theological concept that each second of the day the Resurrection of Christ transforms the existence of man and of the world.

The clock stands 5.8 meters high and 2.5 meters wide, and has 30,000 mechanical parts and 11 movements. It sits in its own room in the clocktower. Verite's coat of arms, those of Cardinal Mathieu, and of the cathedral appear on the front of the clock.

Seventy dials provide 122 indications. These include the seconds, hours, days and years. The clock is a perpetual one that can register up to 10,000 years, including adjustments for leap year cycles. The clock also indicates the times of sunrise and sunset.

Twenty-one automated figures either ring the quarter-hour and the hour, or perform the Resurrection of Christ at noon, and his burial at 3 pm.

The clock also has animated pictures of seven different French harbours and indicates the hours and height of the tides there on dials. One of the harbours is Saint-Pierre, Martinique; another is Cayenne, French Guiana. There is an eighth animated picture, this one of Saint Helena, where the former emperor Napoleon died in exile.

An orrery (planetarium) is part of the clock and it shows the motions and orbits of the planets. The planetary motions are congruent with those of the actual planets so that the planetarium reproduces eclipses as they occur.

The central part of the main body of the clock has 12 dials for parts of the civil calendar, and five for the liturgical calendars. The dials showing the civil calendar show the month, date, day, the solar element that gave its name to the day of the week (e.g., the sun for Sunday), the season, the sign of the Zodiac, the length of the day, the length of the night, the seconds, and the times for sunrise and sunset. One dial gives the date of Easter, and this acts as the driver for dials that present the date for five key days of the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar.

Two columns have 10 dials each. The bottom eight dials show the time in different major cities around the world, including New York and San Francisco, though without adjustment for daylight savings time, which did not exist at the time the clock was built. The two top dials on the left column show the number of solar and lunar eclipses in the current year. The two dials on the right column show the leap years and leap centuries. The hand on the leap century dial moved for the first time in 2000; it will move for the second time in 2400.

A pyramidal arrangement of figures caps the clock. The 12 apostles form the base; two different apostles come out each hour to strike the hour. Also, every hour the three virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity, move, with Faith showing the chalice to Charity and Hope, which stand to her right and left. Above them the statues of the archangels Michael and Gabriel strike the quarter-hours.

At the top of the clock, at midday, Christ arises from his tomb, and at the 3p.m. he returns to it. When he arises, Mary, his mother and Queen of the world, raises her sceptre; she lowers it when he returns to his tomb.

Through a system of universal joints extending some 100 meters, the clock drives four dials that sit on the four sides of the cathedral's tower, thus providing the time of day to the city. A fifth dial is inside the cathedral. The outside dials also show, respectively, the season, the day of the week, and the month of the year. Cables from the clock activate bells in the tower that sound the quarter hour and the hour.

Eleven different descending weights drive the clock. Three of the weights need to be reset each day. (Description from Wikipedia)
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