Having seen the cool photography my friend had done, I wanted to try taking 360 degree panoramics myself. Chris and I brought a camera up to the Cape with us, and set about doing just that.
We took 130 photos using a tripod, encompasing as close to a full 360 both horizontally and vertically as we could. These images were run through Autostitch to stitch them into one giant rectangular panoramic. This panoramic was scaled down (from an original size of over 140 megapixels!) to a more reasonable 30 megapixel image, which was then fed into a program called Pano2QTVR, which converts it into the interactive quicktime movie you see below.
The key things that we will have to be more careful of in the future are taking more photos aimed high and aimed low, since it takes more images to fill that area in well. Also, if there is little detail in the sky, the software has a hard time piecing it together. Some of this can be overcome with Photoshopping, but getting it right without editing is perferable. All in all, I am pleased with the way this experiment came out, and it proves you don't need a really expensive rig to make 360° photos!