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This is a tribut to Escher's Flor de Pascua [The Sphere] which is a woodcut made in 1921. The image itself can be found here: http://www.wikiart.org/en/m-c-escher/the-sphere
Because the ball is round, it can be treated as a lens with a very large field of view. In this case it seems to be approximately 330 degrees field of view (yes, you can see almost directly behind a reflective sphere).
This image was remapped using the wonderful PTGui panoramic stitching software.
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The planet Earth has proven to be too limiting for our awesome community of panorama photographers. We're getting an increasing number of submissions that depict locations either not on Earth (like Mars, the Moon, and Outer Space in general) or do not realistically represent a geographic location on Earth (either because they have too many special effects or are computer generated) and hence don't strictly qualify for our Panoramic World project.But many of these panoramas are extremely beautiful or popular of both.So, in order to accommodate our esteemed photographers and the huge audience that they attract to 360Cities with their panoramas, we've created a new section (we call it an "area") called "Out of this World" for panoramas like these.Don't let the fact that these panoramas are being placed at the Earth's South Pole fool you - we had to put them somewhere in order not to interfere with our Panoramic World.Welcome aboard on a journey "Out of this World".