Great minds think alike! It turns out they had been using a hang glider over Texas:
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But Sam wanted something that showcased all the world records that have been set there. So we went with this:
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It's not nearly as artistic as your work above ... but we did it all without photoshop!!
If anyone is interested in how to do this ...
We started with a list of the destination cities from each flight that I entered as pushpins in Google Earth. Then I rotated the Google Earth view to get a relatively flat perspective (to fit in a banner) that showed all the flights. Then I took a snapshot of the image both with and without the pushpins (exactly the same image otherwise). Then I erased the large pushpins and replaced the locations with a small red dot. I used that image to overlay on top of the original image (the one without the push pins) so the area where the pushpins had been was restored ... that's why they had to be otherwise identical. Then I added the lettering (city names, distances, club name, etc). That was pretty much it except that it wasn't really wide enough for very large monitors. I like banners to span the entire screen, so I had to stretch the image by duplicating some of the sky and space and copying it on to the right (rotating and shifting to match the curvature of the earth). Eventually I got to where the earth had fallen away and it was just the nearly pure black of outer space left. I was able to extend that as wide as I wanted by just filling with that nearly black color. When I get time, I'll try to figure out a way to get phpBB to fill the background with that same nearly black color just where the image is so I can shorten photo and still have it look good on all monitors. I'd like to do that for the RGSA forum as well since that's another place where I used an extra wide image to fill in for wider screens.
It took a few hours, but I think it turned out pretty well!!
