When you’re shooting away with your digital camera sometimes you just want to take a very wide image at a fairly close range.  Unless you have some awesome wide-angle lens, you’re probably are not going to make it work.  Enter a free program from Microsoft Research, Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor) for, of course, Windows. Microsoft ICE is relatively simple to use.  Just snap a series of images of what you’d like to capture.  Each image should contain overlap the last by a little.  Copy the pictures to your PC and drop them into Microsoft ICE.  ICE will then through magic advanced algorithms figure out how to stitch your images together into a complete panorama.  At that time you can make some adjustments and then export the image to a usable image like a jpeg.

How Microsoft Describes ICE

What is Image Composite Editor?

Microsoft Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. You shoot a set of overlapping photographs of a scene from a single location, and Image Composite Editor creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all your images at full resolution. Then save your stitched panorama in a wide variety of formats, from common formats like JPEG and TIFF to multi-resolution tiled formats like HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom

Download Microsoft ICE