Here's the set-up: As we ascended the escalators from the Universal Studios backlot after riding the Jurassic Park water-coaster and seeing the BackDraft demonstration, my family stopped for a photo with the cardboard Apollo 13 stars.

I lingered to take a series of photos of the backlot. My thought was to capture the whole San Fernando Valley vista (the view is about 20 miles) in a series, which I would "stitch" together in Photoshop and come out with a nice, long, frameable, panoramic souvenir of our vacation in 2001. Hah!

During the shooting, I was careful not to change the level of the camera, which I placed on the studio railing for stability.

Independently, each photo looks level—and I scanned them exactly the same way. I wasn't prepared for the shock of assembling the panorama.

In order to match details together, I had to rotate each image slightly, starting at the far right (laying them out from the left proved impossible).

Discussing the rotation with my sister-in-law, we wondered whether I had inadvertently photographed the curvature of the earth.

Turns out the answer is more prosaic. The camera's film plane is flat. When I rotate slight, the new viewing angle doesn't match the previous. It's a cumulative thing. The farther right (or left) I go, the more the alignment drifts. The end result is, won't you admit, a mighty spectacular montage.