Hi Horton. I don't get it either, despite the disclaimers. In the middle third of your "crude color panorama" there seems to be a fairly smooth transition between the reddish-brown on the left and the white on the right. If this was an artefact caused by different sections of the image having been processed in different ways, I'd expect there to be an exactly vertical line sharply demarcating the two regions. The stitching process might alter the colours a little in the immediate vicinity of the join, in order to make the join less obvious, but I don't see how that would be enough to produce the smooth and decidedly non-vertical transition in your image.
