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.

 

If you're thinking of using such a setup for animation I think you'd fail because the closer the arcraft got to the sphere itself the more distorted the image would be. IE: The further you are from where the camera took the image the less real it would look.