Not accounting for position on the surface of the earth could introduce as much as 0.45 degrees of error in the apparent position for an object 500000 miles away. This is same as the apparent diameter of the moon for a reference.
By symmetry, right now from Starman's perspective the Earth appears as large as [we see] the Moon.
Thank you! This is the first I've heard either way.
I do hope you can overcome the curse of knowledge[1] to see how the original post was ambiguous without that information. I simply had to know a-posteriori that the software worked like that (I didn't, the manual[2] offered no clues, and I hadn't yet re-done the calculation).
>However even if the default wasn't center of the Earth, that couldn't alter the apparent size of the Earth from the perspective of the Roadster.
I know the software doesn't rearrange the sky, but my hope is that you can understand how I arrived at that particular off-by-a-factor-of-two error[3] (oddly, by assuming less than I should have).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge