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...
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.
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.