> Furthermore, their core assumption that star positions should appear lower to an observer on a globe than on a plane ("If the earth's curvature is real and causes the angular descent of stars") is faulty Where's the fault? Can you be specific? Stellarium uses globe data and it is considered very accurate for mapping the timing and positions of stars. That's why it was used. It's interesting how it's used as a source to support the globe model predictions in other scenarios, yet here it's 'not accurate'.

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From the comment you’re replying to I quote; “the Stellarium software, on which they depend for predicting occlusion times, is intended for star observation session planning, not exact timing. It can be a minute or two off at times, and atmospheric conditions add more potential errors.”
Stellerium is as accurate as consumer software gets when it comes to predicting where a star appears in the sky at a given time. The timing is pretty much exact for these purposes. Not a few minutes, seconds if you really want to split hairs. Lets be clear, and I'm quite perplexed that this needs to be explained. The timing from stellerium is the same reference used for both models being tested. Stellerium gives you the stars position, then that position is compared against the predictions of the globe and 'flat'. If it was inaccurate (it's not, I don't know why it's even been disputed aside from cope) then both sets of models are still using the same data. Any timing errors would move the models closer to each other, and you substract the difference between where the two predictions land. So any supposed timing errors cancel out, they are not a factor in the difference of results between the two predictions. What you could try to dispute would be factors that are specific to each prediction - observer height, elevation and distance to the peak. The test is setup to be sensitive to parameters that appear in one model and not the other (curvature, for example) while specifically being agnostic to parameters that appear in both models, for which timing false into. The point is moot.