Some of you might know about my infatuation with 36o degree panoramas. I have a Ricoh Theta, which is amazing fun, but it has a very low resolution and so I mostly use it as a quick and dirty toy. You can’t really take ‘real’ photos with it.

I recently picked up another toy, which does very high res panoramas, but it does this by rotating itself and taking 25 shots and sewing them together itself. It works great, except that it has a little trouble joining the seams of the images. Pretty much every edge has a double image, hurting what is otherwise a pretty spectacular experience.

Someone recommended a manual process, so I loaded up a program called Hugin. It’s a freeware application that is designed to create 36o-degree panoramas from individual shots.

It has an automatic mode:

But that doesn’t really work as well as I’d hoped. It’s cool! but I was hoping for something like 43% less surreal.

So I put a lot of effort into linking the images manually. Hugin allows you to select ‘control points’ which it uses to sort out the math and warp the individual shots into a sphere.

Which, again, is cool, but a bit pinched in one spot. A bit.

So I settled in for a long session of painstakingly adding hundreds of super-accurate control points and told Hugin to do it right this time, and it very nearly did!

Very nearly. Except for the giant space spiral in the middle.

Dammit.