4 image::load-maps.png[width="5.2in"]
6 Before heading out to a new launch site, you can use
7 this to load satellite images in case you don't have
8 internet connectivity at the site.
10 There's a drop-down menu of launch sites we know
11 about; if your favorites aren't there, please let us
12 know the lat/lon and name of the site. The contents of
13 this list are actually downloaded from our server at
14 run-time, so as new sites are sent in, they'll get
15 automatically added to this list. If the launch site
16 isn't in the list, you can manually enter the lat/lon
19 There are four different kinds of maps you can view;
20 you can select which to download by selecting as many
21 as you like from the available types:
24 A combination of satellite imagery and road data. This
28 Just the satellite imagery without any annotation.
31 Roads, political boundaries and a few geographic
35 Contour intervals and shading that show hills and
38 You can specify the range of zoom levels to download;
39 smaller numbers show more area with less
40 resolution. The default level, 0, shows about
41 3m/pixel. One zoom level change doubles or halves that
42 number. Larger zoom levels show more detail, smaller
45 The Map Radius value sets how large an area around the
46 center point to download. Select a value large enough
47 to cover any plausible flight from that site. Be aware
48 that loading a large area with a high maximum zoom
49 level can attempt to download a lot of data. Loading
50 hybrid maps with a 10km radius at a minimum zoom of -2
51 and a maximum zoom of 2 consumes about 120MB of
52 space. Terrain and road maps consume about 1/10 as
53 much space as satellite or hybrid maps.
55 Clicking the 'Load Map' button will fetch images from
56 Google Maps; note that Google limits how many images
57 you can fetch at once, so if you load more than one
58 launch site, you may get some gray areas in the map
59 which indicate that Google is tired of sending data to