German orbital mechanics guru Gerald Ziegler. Gerald discovered that the Space Station covered similar ground to Gagarin's spaceship every week or so. But to complicate things further the film makers needed to film at exactly the same time of day that Gagarin made his flight; passing over the launch site, near the Aral Sea, at 06:07 UT and on into the night side of Earth over the Pacific Ocean, before emerging into sunlight again over the Southern Atlantic and passing across the whole African continent and the Middle East, and returning to the ground at 07:55 UT, just north of the Caspian Sea. Further calculations confirmed that opportunities to film this trajectory from the ISS at this time of day only came round every six weeks or so.

The second challenge was fitting these filming opportunities into crew time on board the Space Station. The astronauts are obviously very busy, conducting a packed programme of experiments, Earth observations and activities like sleep, exercise and meal times meant that accommodating this extra filming request was another problem for the ESA mission directors to solve.

Amongst them Roland Luttgens and Giovanni Gravili who worked closely with the team to turn the filming opportunities Gerald identified into the precise technical notes needed to translate Chris's camera directions into instructions for the crew. After a brief test shoot in November 2010, conducted by NASA's expedition 25 astronaut Doug Wheelock, European Space Agency astronaut Paolo Nespoli filmed most of the footage for the project in late December 2010 and early January 2011, showing the Earth as Gagarin would have seen it almost exactly fifty years before.

The result is a mesmerising journey beyond the atmosphere - an entire orbit of the Earth - that only around five hundred people have ever experienced for real. What Paolo has recorded is a very gritty, real view of the Earth from space. "You can see scratches and blemishes on the windows", says Chris, "and we’ve purposefully kept some of the moments when Paolo moves the camera in the film too, just to remind us that this footage has been recorded by human beings up there rather than unmanned robotic satellites."

Paolo never appears in the film himself, but as the Space Station flies into the night side of the Earth over the north Pacific you can catch a glimpse of him reflected in the window as he floats towards the camera to adjust it.

"Gagarin flew over a lot of ocean during his mission", Chris reminds us, "and on the days Paolo filmed there were some stunning cloud formations hanging over these deep blue vistas. But one of my favourite views occurs as we cross the Sahara Desert and head up towards the Middle East. There's the whole of north Africa and the glowing red Sahara and the winding dark Nile river laid out beneath us - just as Gagarin would have seen it as he made his final approach towards the landing site. Completely coincidently, as Paolo filmed this final leg of the flight, the camera lost its focus on the Earth and started to blur the view - giving the illusion that we are descending back into the atmosphere as Vostok 1 did during re-entry. "It was perfect for the end of the film" Chris reflects.... [--> 3 of 3]

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