Recreate the Orbital Path Seen in the Film Gravity

Stefan Geens matched the views of Earth seen in Gravity and mapped them into Google Earth. The video above shows the “fly over” of the orbital path as seen in Google Earth. You can also download a KMZ file and load it into Google Earth yourself to try it.

Geens found that the rendering of Earth in the film was very accurate, but the daylight and night portions. He was able to find perfect matches of Earth in nearly all cases, not just for coastlines but for geographic features such as lakes, mountain ranges and forests and, at night, city lights and lit roads.

He goes into great detail on his site about how he recreated the orbit, each location mapped, and the anomalies he discovered along the way.