Google Earth strikes again!

As I'm planning out the Roseburg area, Google Earth just keeps making itself ever more useful.

Even though it's not structures per se, I also need to finish the sky and backdrop behind Roseburg - and I've been looking at Google Earth's fly down and look around in 3D capability. Using some screen captures, I built this panoramic view of the Roseburg backdrop using Google Earth:

 Part of Roseburg backdrop built using Google Earth - to see entire panorama, click image

This makes building the background mountain profile I'll need to paint very easy to see. Here's a photo taken just across from the Roseburg train station toward the "background" mountains above.

And below, is the background I've built using Google Earth, with the mountains you can see above outlined with a dotted red line:

You can see the contours match very well, with the only difference being some 3 dimensional trees sticking up in the actual photo.

By using a combination of photos from the location and Google Earth, I can get a backdrop that's going to have correct mountain contours that match the prototype location perfectly!