As for how to shoot panoramas – I use the stitch assist mode on my Canon compact point and click, which basically just locks the aperture and shutter speed from one shot to the next and gives you hints how much further to pan the cam, and use Microsoft ICE to stitch the results.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ICE/
It's free to download and totally kills any other stitching tool I've ever used in terms of speed and quality. Your images can even have varying brightnesses, it tries to auto-compensate for this. Get it!