Can image layer be rotated in OpenLayers?

Question

While working on Ground Overlays, I noticed that it has a tag called <rotation>

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <kml xmlns="http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2">
      <GroundOverlay>
        <name>Large-scale overlay on terrain</name>
        <visibility>1</visibility>
        <description>Overlay shows Mount Etna erupting on July 13th, 2001.</description>
        <Icon>
          <href>http://kml-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/resources/etna.jpg</href>
        </Icon>
        <LatLonBox>
          <north>37.91904192681665</north>
          <south>37.46543388598137</south>
          <east>15.35832653742206</east>
          <west>14.60128369746704</west>
         <rotation>11.9556640799496235</rotation>
        </LatLonBox>
      </GroundOverlay>
    </kml>

My question is - can an image layer be rotated in 2D view? Following is the code I am using to add an Image and set its bounding box.

var options = {   
            'opacity': 1.0, 
            'isBaseLayer': false,
            numZoomLevels : 20 

        };
        var image = new OpenLayers.Layer.Image(
            groundOverlay.name,
            groundOverlay.href,
            new OpenLayers.Bounds( groundOverlay.west, groundOverlay.south,  groundOverlay.east, groundOverlay.north),
            new OpenLayers.Size(1, 1),
            options
            );

        map.addLayers([image]);

Following the screen shot when above KML is displayed on my local system without rotation.

Google Maps does not seem to rotate the image, but Google Earth plugin does.

Answer 1

Openlayers can't display rotated images as Layer.Image. If you want to display rotated images, you can use as workaround a vector layer with point feature and externalGraphic.

Example of rotation:

http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/rotate-features.html

And example of rotation with graphic:

http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/styles-rotation.html

And description for external graphic

http://docs.openlayers.org/library/feature_styling.html