I just discovered this tonight while doing a bit of research for an upcoming trip and figured it may be of use to some of our members who like to get out into new waters in their own boat. I kept having to flick between the Google Earth photo of the reefs and the zoning maps and try to remember where the zoning area went - this allows you to make the zoning maps transparent and overlay them permanently into your Google Earth.
Go to the zoning map of the area you are looking at, they can be found here ->
http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/corp_site/management/zoning/zoning_maps.htmlOpen up the map and go to the area you are interested in, i'm using the Whitsundays area. Zoom in on the area and take a screen shot. On the MAC the map will open in Preview, choose File/Grab/Selection and save as a JPEG. On a PC it should open in Adobe Reader, choose Tools/Select & Zoom/Snapshot Tool and then click and drag it over the area you are interested in. Then open MS-Paint, paste the image and then save as a JPEG. Either way you should have a JPEG file that is just an image of the zoning areas you are interested in.
Next open Google Earth and zoom into the same area that you just saved the zoning map image over. It doesn't need to be exact at all, just in the same area. Click Tools/Add/Image Overlay. It will open up a screen with a Browse tab - click this and navigate to the image of the zoning map you saved in step one. It will look like this ->
(refer to image google earth 1.jpg)Next slide the transparency slider towards Clear until you can see through the image you saved and see the Google Earth image underneath it. It will look like this. Note how you can see the Lindeman Island in both the photo and the map but they are not overlapped.->
(refer to image transparent tutorial.jpg)You now need to align the image so that it lines up with photo. The image has series of green crosshairs on the edges, corners and in the middle. You can move the mouse over the top of these and move the image in the relevant direction ie grab the middle to move the whole image, grab the centre right green cross to move the right edge of the photo etc. Do this until all the islands/reefs/reference points on the image align with Google Earth photo. ->
(refer to image final tutorial.jpg)(Note that if you try and align too large an area of zoning map with the Google Earth photo then it will be impossible to make all points align...something to do with the zoning map being a flat surface and google earth being curved possibly, really not sure?)Once this is done click OK in the bottom right of the opened window and the image is now saved and will be there every time you open Google Earth. You can toggle the image on and off by selecting or de-selecting it in Places/My Places window on the left hand side of the Google Earth window. Done!
Hopefully someone finds this handy, a little bit of mucking around but once it's done it's a handy reference to have and it will always be saved there to refer back to for what ever reason.
