Probably a little late to join the discussion, but I just started doing 360 spherical panos in caves earlier this year. This grew out of a potential for doing a LIDAR and photo overlay for portions of the Chandelier Ball Room in Lech for replication in the new National Cave and Karst Research Institute in Carlsbad, NM. Still in the planning stages at this moment. Anyway, I've taken some of them at a commercial cave in southern Pennsylvania earlier this year and will be shooting a series of them in Cave Without a Name in Texas next spring. I just gave a presentation at Convention in Vermont last week about it.
I use a Manfrotto 303SPH head and PTgui software to stitch it all together. It works incredibly well and I am VERY happy with the results. Still working on logistics and different types of lighting for it: flash, in-cave or light painting. Each have their advantages and dis-. If you want to see one of the pano movies I did, drop me a line at
pjcaver@gwi.net and I'll e-mail it directly to you. Too big to post on this blog....
Peter Jones