Are you asking about how to stitch all those photos together? That's software that came with my "cheap" Canon point-and-shoot - nothing fancy. The software is called PhotoStitch. 

Basically you stand in one spot. Put the camera in panoramic mode. Take a picture. Then it shows you your first picture on the left side of the screen. You turn right and sort of line up the new viewpoint (doesn't have to be exact) then shoot again. Repeat as many times as you want. Then you load the pictures into your computer, and run PhotoStitch on them. It already knows which ones go together and in what order. Hit GO. Done. Save as JPEG.

Sorry I can't help with a more manual approach - I rely on that software.

I then loaded the new panorama into photoshop. I resized it because it was 28000 pixels wide. I reduced it to 6000 pixels wide (if I recall correctly - maybe it was 3000). Then I made the canvas size to half that so it was 2-to-1 ratio and saved it. This I then loaded onto the sphere, with U_Scale = -1. As we all now understand I could have first flipped it in photoshop, but regardless it works either way.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)