I'm working on a Metamorphosis Alpha scenario for GaryCon II and wanted to get some help using real-world sources for my maps.

For those not familiar with MA, it's arguably the first published science fiction RPG. The players are descendants of a starship crew that have mutated and forgotten their origins, like Heinlein's Orphans in the Sky and Aldiss's Non-Stop. The ship is divided into levels (with artificial gravity so that they're stacked like a layer cake). Each level is half a mile high, and connected by inclined ramps leading up to the level above. For those who do know MA, there's a chance that Jim Ward, the game's creator, will play in this scenario so I want to make it as awesome and 21st century as possible!

My idea is that, as the characters gain access to a lower level, they'll start out on the top of one of these inclined ramps, looking down 2,600 feet at the landscape spread out below. I'm thinking that I could use a panoramic photo from a mountaintop as a player handout to show them what they see, and suggest some potential areas they might want to go and explore. This view from Mount Kobau in Vancouver and this one of somewhere in Hawaii are examples I found with Google image search, although I'm not sure what height they're taken from.

Then I'm thinking I'd use Google Earth to get a view of the area shown in the photo, scaled properly for my hex map (1 mile across). Is there a guide out there to using Google Earth or Google Map to get images that are scaled for different wilderness map hex sizes?

Any resources or tips for finding images that I could link to specific locations would also be most appreciated!