By EugeniusD80

I came across a thread on DPReview and was fascinated by those unique images. Soon I discovered thousands of similar images on flickr in a group called “Create your own planets” (There are also several smaller groups on flickr: Stereographic Projections Pool, * making planets *, and Polar Panoramas).

There is a nice tutorial written by Dirk Paessler on how to create this so-called “Polar Panorama Effect” using Adobe Photoshop or Gimp.

If you want to dig into this even more, read about stereographic projection and  cartographical map projections (also these images).