According to Franz Birbaum, Fabergé’ workshop manager, the egg was conceived as a clock in the form of a celestial globe of dark blue glass encircled by a rotating dial, held above billowing rock crystal clouds surmounted by silver cherubs; the whole supported on a nephrite pedestal.

The globe was to be decorated with a diamond studded engraving of the constellations under which Tsarevitch Alexei was born.

Work began on the egg, but the 1917 February Revolution and subsequent events overtook its production.

[1] In 2001, its unfinished clouds and globe were uncovered in the collection of the Fersman Mineralogical Museum in Moscow, where Fabergé's second son Agathon, left them in 1925.

[3] Russian art collector Alexander Ivanov claims that he owns the original (and finished)[4] egg.