This was taken from the top of Arrow Peak, in Kings Canyon National Park.
This image was made with existing images, which I pulled down off my own web site. So this shows what you might be able to do with existing photos. The pictures were made with a compact 35mm camera, a Olympus XA. It has automatic exposure control, but I suspect all the segments were exposed about the same because the individual images were relatively uniform in color, and because the lighting was also uniform.
The big problem here was that the edges of each picture were darker then the center. This happens in all cameras, and is inescapable in the way the lens focuses light on the negative. But it is probably much worse in a camera optimized to be small, not image quality. You can see the effect clearly in the original source images. I dealt with it by retouching the sky after I had made the panorama. The result is a somewhat blotchy sky, with some artifacts (straight lines, mostly) that are not in the original pictures. I could fix these with enough patience.
Drag the mouse over the picture to pan. Use Shift and Control to zoom.