Engraving a date: four ways, and what each one says

The figures

“12/05/23” on a wooden bead. Clean, readable at a metre, and needing no explanation. It is also the only one of the four that anybody can read — a colleague, a stranger on the Tube.

That isn't a fault. For a wedding or a birth you usually want it read. But for a young relationship, eight engraved figures sometimes move faster than the relationship does.

The place, in coordinates

51.5074° N, 0.1278° W. Two lines of digits that mean nothing to anybody but the two of you. It is the discreet option: the bracelet goes to the office without anyone asking a thing.

One technical nuance matters. We engrave the pair you type, exactly as typed. Enter an address and our server converts it; enter coordinates and they travel untouched, uncorrected. That is deliberate — a geocoder always snaps a point to the nearest address it knows, sometimes thirty metres away, and thirty metres on the spot where you met is not the same pavement.

The sky of that night

A poster this time. Give a place, a date and a time, and we compute the true position of every star visible to the naked eye that evening — 5,044 stars down to magnitude 6, and the traces that draw the constellations.

The calculation accounts for precession and for daylight saving: the time zone comes from the country of the place, not from your browser. A night in August 1994 in Lisbon does not hold the same sky as a night in August 1994 in Warsaw, and the poster shows it.

The moon of that evening

The fourth way is the most literal and the gentlest: the moon exactly as it stood. Not a stock moon — a NASA photograph, cut to a disc, with the terminator shadow in its right place.

Around it, the ring of the twenty-nine or thirty nights of that lunation, new moon to new moon, each at its own illumination. You can see at a glance where the chosen night falls in the cycle. And in the southern hemisphere the moon is upside down — because it genuinely is.