make-your-own-panorama software

Fred: I read your complete ride report of your trek across North America and really enjoyed it, and all of the photos. I especially liked a couple of the photostitched images you put together, and was wondering if you'd share the name of the software that you used to piece them together. I've seen lots and lots out there, but valued your opinion on ease of use, etc. and figured if there's a bit of software out there that you'd spend time using, it's probably worth investigating. -- Chad

This is the kind of image he's talking about:
Click for Black Canyon panorama

(let it load all the way; and you may have to use your browser's zoom function to view it in full resolution)

There are quite a few panorama tools, as a Google search will reveal: http://tinyurl.com/63r8p7

The one I used is Autostitch:
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

It's almost AI-ware: you can feed in images in any order and it will automagically find the matching parts of adjacent images, assemble the collage as a continuous visual whole, blend the seams together, do the math to correct for varying perspectives, and then generate a single image. It's very cool, and free; it's a demo of the technology built into other commercial panorama tools

It runs a few times, and then disables itself, but I discovered quite by accident that if you run it from inside a zip archive, the demo never times out... 8-)