it is amazing, well done.
Personally I would like to see more of the bottom to balance such a vast panoramic view.
One of those aspects of photography that I always admire, because I don't do it and don't know how to do it. But am always fascinated to see the result of this stitching of, in this case, 16 photographs. And in this case, it is a very attention-grabbing result.
Donald,
Recent versions of Photoshop or Elements are so good at this that there is absolutely no black magic involved. The photos were taken handheld, with auto exposure (the overcast weather helped with even lighting..).
When I wanted to try panoamas I read articles about finding the nodal point of my lens and even bought a panorama head for my tripod - which I have never bothered to use.. Things get harder in you follow the composition rule of having something interesting in the foreground (this is where your nodal point becomes important) and you end up with less waste around the edges with a panorama head, but for a single line distant panorama like this handheld works fine.
All you need is (1) to hold the camera level - having the horizon in the image helps.. and (2) to have about 1/3 overlap between images, with some detail which PS can use to align images with each other - a featureless blue sky or an endlessly repeating pattern will stump it.
Note that PS will not simply rearrange your images but also stretch and skew then as necessary, and also adjust exposure between images to match. It is often recommended to use manual exposure to get consistence betwwen adjoining images, but I have found that PS is pretty good at dealing with this too.
The output from the panorama tool is a .psd file with each contributing image on its own layer with its own mask. If it looks OK (most of the time) flatten the image and take it from there. What remains is normal photo editing - straighten the image, crop it and adjust exposure. Most of my time in editing photos like this is spent adjusting contrast and vibrance to compensate for atmospheric haze..
I forgot to mention: Shoot vertical images. Sounds counterintuitive, but otherwise you end up with a very narrow strip of images..