Sky Panoramic Problem

[MarcusG]

Was recently up north and decided to have a shot at some night sky shots. Only got the kit lens (18-55) on my 60D, and my tripod was rubbish, so there was a lot of blur, did a panoramic though (using 27 odd photos) so it doesnt look so bad, the problem I am having is when I stich it with Microsoft ICE it gets REALLY stretched across the top, and I can't figure out for the life of me how to fix it. Anyone have any tips/help getting it fixed up?
Thanks in advance,
Marcus
Oh, and here is the (scaled down) panoramic.

[milesy]

havent used ICE but have played with CS4 and also another free pano stitching software program ( the name of which escapes me) - there are a couple of different stitching options in CS4 so it might be worth playing with those??

[MarcusG]

havent used ICE but have played with CS4 and also another free pano stitching software program ( the name of which escapes me) - there are a couple of different stitching options in CS4 so it might be worth playing with those??

Alas, I do not have CS4, I'm a stingy uni student so I've only got GIMP.
I did try using 'Hugin' but couldn't really figure out what was going on with it...

[milesy]

ill have a quick look and see what i used that was free (its on my work laptop) hang 5

[milesy]

sorry my mistake it was ICE after all........have you tried changing the camera motion options?

[MarcusG]

Yeah, "Rotating Motion" was the only one that stuck the shots together how I want, all the planar ones stuck the milky way in a straight line with the ground broken up around the edges of the shot.
Hope that makes at least a bit of sense.

[Mark L]

You could try doing it with the photo stitch that is in the ZoomBrowser software that came with your camera. See if it does the same thing.

[Dylfish]

try change your pano settings to cylindrical and see if that works. Also it may be a nodal point error stemming from the tripod

[Ezookiel]

The 60D comes with Canon PhotoStitch software on one of the discs that came with it. I've used it many many times for panoramas quite succesfully.
Maybe give it a go.

[MarcusG]

Photostitch proved no good, I've found it is alright with mine up to about 4 shots across, beyond that it loses it a bit, and given this is about 28 shots needing to be stiched both across an up it didn't really work.
Doesn't appear to be a "Cylindrical" option on any of the programs I have.
I'm thinking that seing as the only problem is it getting stretched up the higher end, surely there must be some way to compress the image in by different amounts so it all comes together?
Thanks for all the help so far too.

[dieselpower]

First off great shot - I really hope you can get it to stitch as it will look great I reckon!

Have a look at AutoPano Giga (or AutoPano Pro). You can download a free trial, been a while since I used the trial so I can't remember if it overlays a watermark or not, but it should at least give you an idea of whether or not the stitch will work. I'm very happy with it and am using it more and more now as it's quicker and generally more accurate at getting it right than photoshop.

Autopano can be downloaded from http://www.kolor.com/