[bilbo0s]

>* some 'manual effort' would have been involved to make the picture look natural...*

????

Of course.

You take these photos by mounting a dSLR on what is essentially a programmable tripod type thingy. It takes a series of photos, and all the images are stitched together in software. Depending on the software used, the algorithms will place things differently. Using different software to stitch the mosaic would result in, (probably), different artifacts in the final image.