A panorama is built by stitching together many images taken from the same viewpoint.

The 1st critical thing you need to know, is that the camera may not move. It may only rotate. If the camera moves a tiny bit, that's generally OK, but there will be stitching artifacts. To be really precise, the entrance pupil of the camera shouldn't move, but this is quite hard to get right.

The 2nd thing, is that the stitching algorithms need to match images to each other, and in order to do this, the images must have large overlapping portions. This usually means that if you want to create a 360 degree panorama where you spin your camera all the way around, you'll have at least about 12 images. The minimum number of images depends on how wide your lens is.

This is a great overview of panoramas: http://6.869.csail.mit.edu/fa17/lecture/lecture14sift_homogr...

One more thing: It really helps to apply lens correction to your camera images, if you're trying to create a high quality panorama.

(sorry don't have time to run through the OP script and check what you're getting for outputs, but...)

- I'm not even entirely sure how these images would stitch together

- between 1.jpeg and the rest, there is very little overlap. RANSAC likely won't find matchable points.

- you're asking for a pretty severe homography of the scene.

Panorama Stitcher (macOS) matched 3 and 4 to give https://imgur.com/a/HnagrrH but image 2 is just too skewed to match, even after rotating in Photoshop, and image 1 is just wonky re: 4 and difficult to orient for a match.