Plotting on Google Earth

You can use Google Earth to plot your favorite cave locations. I created a bit map symbol for caves (cave.bmp) “” and saved it in my C:\Program Files\Google\Google Earth. If you have the coordinates for the caves you can easily plot them, assign a name and use the cave symbol to show the location on Google Earth. Of course you do not have to share them with the world, you can save as My Places.kml where ever you like and send them to other cavers.

You will need to convert the Lat Long to decimal to enter into Google Earth in the format: 34.123456, -85.67891. To convert the minutes to deg divide by 60, to convert the seconds to deg divide by 60 twice, then add the two together. For example 34 deg 20′ 45″ would convert 20/60=0.333333 plus 45/60/60=0.0125. 34+0.333333+0.0125=34.345833.

Google Earth will then zoom in on your cave location, click the Add Placemark pin and type in the name of the cave along with any comments that you want to be displayed. You can now zoom and angle your view for printing or just to study the cave locations

This entry was posted on April 24, 2007 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Caving Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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