The next time you encounter a nice vista, something to keep in mind is that there are programs that will assemble a group of photos in to a panoramic pictures.

There's a nice freeware program called "Autostitch" for Windows that can do it.
http://cvlab.epfl.ch/~brown/autostitch/autostitch.html
(The source for Autostitch is also used in a bunch of commercial apps)