Limits on Panoramas

I'm making ever larger panoramas. I made one of the walk from the front door to my parking space. It's all red stone with grass growing between it. I'll say a bit more about it on my picasa page when I upload it. And I've made a few of the mountains with my camera's zoom maxed out (optical only, not the useless digital zoom).

The mountain one that I'm working on now is composed of 59 images. in 3 rows - though the top two rows are much shorter than the lower row which is all mountains. The top two rows are mostly clouds, but the clouds were changing too fast and my stitching software is having a hard time finding corresponding points in the overlaps. So this reveals the first set of limits - changing weather conditions and a slow camera. If I could take pictures faster, the weather wouldn't be so much of a problem.

Another limit is my own patience - which is responsible for the incomplete second and third row (from the bottom) in the zoomed mountain stitch. Of course most of the missing parts would be all clear blue sky, so I might paint them back in. But I was shooting a tree in our yard with my camera zoomed in and gave up 1/2 way through as it was taking far too long and it was just an experimental shoot - not something I'd care to frame and hang on the wall.

And then there's always the limit of the computer hardware to handle very large stitches. Though the stitching software takes a 59 image and, though it takes a little while, churns along without complaint. It did complain about the lack of matching points in the all cloud pictures though.