Question about nighttime panoramic shots

[RyanColes]

Hi guys, my name is Ryan Coles and I am a rookie photographer. I have been trying to take some shots of my city at night and make a panorama of my city. I try taking my pictures at night as I do during the day but when I put them into CS3 I have what looks like tears in the pictures. I am sure that I am not under overlapping if that makes sense and my tripod is level so I guess I am just not sure what would cause this. I would appreciate any help or tips on what I need to do to fix this. I'll be going out this evening and trying again but I am hoping to figure out what I need to so I can change if I am doing something wrong.

Thanks
Ryan

[OsmosisStudios]

if you can post examples it'll be MUCH easier to help.

[dcclark]

Yes, examples please! I'm guessing that you probably didn't leave enough overlap, and then the distortions which Photoshop had to apply (basically, straightening and de-perspectifying) your photos may have left gaps between the images.

[Elmo]

While awaiting your examples a few pano tips
!. do not use lenses with noticable distortion at the edges. Wide are bad at this, use longer lens and ude more shots.
2. Overlap a bunch. I likely use too much as iy takes me 3 captures to cover the area of two normal captures.
3. Level I use a long level on the tripod (tripods are a must) center post to get the base of the head level. Then use a shoe mounted level to get camera level on the head.
4. Shoot manual pick an exposure and stick with it for all exposures.

[RyanColes]

Ok now I'm confused. I had never saved the pano before due to the crack looking marks in the pic and in my CS3 the crop tool was working funny. Like I had no middle squares to adjust the size. Just the 4 corner boxes of crop box. Well I saved the whole image and was gonna just crop w/windows pic viewer. Well when I opened the paho image the cracks were all gone. I cropped it and it turned out looking ok. I dunno what caused the cracks but it looks like it didn't ruin the pic. Here is how it turned out.

[Nicole]

I've had this problem before. When you're zoomed out and see the entire picture in CS3/4 it looks like there are white cracks. When you zoom in they disappear. I figure it's just one of those things that happens because you're zoomed to an odd level.

[Elmo]

And I wasted all that typing

looks good to me

[RyanColes]

Not a waste at all, I appreciate help/tips. Thank you very much.