The Panosaurus Panoramic Tripod Head is a fully spherical attachment which lets you take high quality panoramic photos. What makes it different? Well a real pano head like this apparently rotates around the optic center or nodal point of the camera, which means distortion free images. Who knew? $75.95.
A standard camera tripod is designed to hold and rotate a camera around the tripod mounting hole of the camera. This hole is located arbitrarily somewhere on the camera body. However, to take accurate panoramic photos it is important that the camera be mounted and then rotated around what is called the optical center (sometimes called the nodal point or entrance pupil) of the camera’s lens. This ensures that optical distortion, called parallax distortion, will not be introduced into your pictures before they are then stitched together using computer software. Many people use panoramic tripod heads to not only take wide vista shots, but also to take 360 degree QTVR photos and photo mosaics (multi-row megapixel panoramas).
Noice!
Any SLR worth its salt will also have the film plane (or sensor plane) marked on the body somewhere. Use that to align it with the above tripod and then use this software http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ and you’ll be in tripod heaven!