Stitching together scans

[Captain Zep]

I want to stitch together 6 scanned images (of one larger picture).  What's the easy way to do this?  Is there a free program I can download?  I used to be able to do this a while ago, but it was a while ago (and two computers ago) and I've completely forgotten. 

thanks

[Craig]

I think you could do this using hugin - Panorama photo stitcher
Its designed for stitching panoramas, but it should also work for scans if set up correctly. It can be a bit complicated, but there's a tutorial here: Hugin tutorial — Stitching flat scanned images
Though that tutorial seems to be for an older version, the current version should be similar, but easier to use - I think it now does more automatically.

[andygates]

+1 hugin is easy for flat stuff.

[Captain Zep]

thanks chaps, I'll give that a go.   

[saturn]

iMerge

Very easy and slick. I've never used it on scanned images but I've used it to stitch together multiple overlapping webcam astroimages fairly seamlessly. If you zoom right in on the following huge 2.2mb image of the moon you can detect just a few signs of joins (despite the fact that IIRC  it was made up of something like 30 separate images) but at normal viewing size they're invisible. I'd guess that merging a few scanned images would be even easier.

http://www.beaconrcc.org.uk/resources/moon20030916.jpg