Quote - Popping in late in the conversation, but "high-altitude" panoramas over terrain (or even water) would fill a massive gap that currently exists in panomaric images: there are very few around that are taken with an airborne camera (for good technical reasons).

I ran into the problem the other day when I was trying to set up a render of an aircraft in flight using IDL and the envirosphere. You could orient the image well enough to make it look like the aircraft was flying over a valley, but the reflections on the vehicle-- which you could see because the goal was to be close enough to make out the people inside through the windows--showing what was behind the camera, made it quite clear the photographer was on the ground.

Good points. I am definitely planning to try this out, as Khai-J-Bach also suggested along these lines earlier in the thread...

At the moment I am still waiting for a hilly landscape with what will hopefully look like rocks, grass, trees and lakes, to finish rendering at 4000 pixels.

Once I get that down, I could try an aerial camera view of that same terrain... as it uses an infinite terrain plane, as a test of that principle.

Then I was going to try a red desert / barren (Martian?)  alien planet of some sort I think...

:-)