I used a 16-85mm Nikkor right down at the 16mm end of the zoom.
A couple of other things I forgot to mention:
1. I had three aircraft fly past with blinking lights on their wings that I had to clone out of the final image.
2. You need a fair chunk of available disc space during the process to do it using raws and tiffs like I did. (If you shoot jpegs to start with it's not so much of an issue.) When I had all 101 raws and tiffs on my disc they came to very nearly 10Gb. I've deleted them all now and just kept one DNG version (11Mb) of the final image which I've imported back into lightroom
Don't know if HDR merge will do it. The magazine article says that you can stack the images on top of each other in Photoshop (I assume they mean using layers) and then change the blending mode to "Lighten". But they also say that with so many images to stack "this can prove tedious". I bet!
I hope you do have a go Andy (and I hope it stops raining soon!) If you do, don't forget to post the results here...
Dave P.