Although Google Maps gives you a choice between satellite
images, road maps, or topo maps, the same choices are not readily
available in Google Earth to my knowledge. I've now found a simple
way to link U. S. topo maps to Google Earth. Go to
<http://www.gearthblog.com/kmfiles/topomaps.kmz> to get the file
called topomaps.kmz. To install, just click on the file once you
have it, then right click on it in Google Earth and go to
Properties. Under the Refresh tab, change View-Based Refresh to
After Camera Stops, with a time delay of 4 seconds. This speeds up
loading time for regular views since the topo maps are not constantly
trying to download when you're just moving around. Drag the topomap
overlay from Temporary Places to My Places so that you will not have
to load and configure it next time you want to use it.
This works by linking to a server of topo maps; the actual
maps are not downloaded to your computer except for the view you have
up on the screen, so it does not take up a lot of memory or storage
space. It creates an image overlay of the appropriate topo map on
top of the normal Google Earth satellite view. It works in
combination with any other image overlays you may have, like the .kml
file for a cave line plot (exportable from Compass). You can vary
the transparency of overlays from invisible to opaque using a slider,
so you can have as dark or light amount of topo info as you want, or
you can turn that layer off altogether. This doubles as a way to
have seamless topo map coverage of the entire country. It's pretty
Cool! Check it out.
Mark Minton
Please reply to mmin...@caver.net
Permanent email address is mmin...@illinoisalumni.org
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