Thanks for your intelligent, well thought out comment!
I also did not come to this topic with any preconceived ideas. I'm not one to follow the herd, nor take for granted anything the government or school taught us. I'm an anarchist, and I've fought the corrupt government in their utterly corrupt courts and seen the level of what I would probably call 'conspiracy' against the people to keep them in the dark about their government. And I have no doubts that NASA might lie for many reasons.
However, I've done the research. And when I say RESEARCH, I mean research. I don't mean just watching YouTube videos. My entire life the last 8 years has been doing medical research after quitting my job as a Registered Nurse and rejecting the vast majority of the allopathic medical model as just drug pushing and surgery with scant, to no to contradictory evidence of the effectiveness of either.
So, I know how to research and weed out the bullcrap from the evidence. And the evidence of a round earth is overwhelming. And it's very very easy to disprove a flat earth to a mathematical certainty.
And our senses are entirely fallible, just like you showed with your experience with crepscular rays, and there are so many other optical illusions that we see every day, and there are so many ways that our brain filters what does come into our senses, that we can use our senses as evidence, but those sensory experiences cannot be 'gospel', else we'd all believe that people literally get smaller and higher up as they walk away from us! But we understand that doesn't ACTUALLY occur, so we automatically filter that out as nonsense and we 'see' them simply as being far away without even thinking about it.
In fact, my next post will be on how 'trusting our senses' is the weakest argument there is for a flat earth, but that is one of the biggest arguments that flat earthers make.
And I caution you that to do the experiments yourself is even not necessarily going to tell you anything unless you understand the science of what you are doing and carefully take all measurements into consideration and get them independently verified.
For instance, do you understand refraction and superrefraction and understand how to take these effects into account? If not, your experiment would be horribly flawed and you might be convinced of something that is easily explained in opposition to what you are seeing with a bit of scientific understanding. So, a 'high powered lens aimed across many miles of water' may completely convince you of something that is not true if you do not do the experiment correctly, measure everything correctly, have these measurements independently verified by a neutral party, do the experiment in a way that is repeatable and conforms to actual scientific research... as flat earthers almost never do.
For instance, most flat earthers will put their camera on the beach and conclude they are at 'sea level', but if they were to set up an altimeter, they could easily be 20 feet up from actual sea level due to high tides, the slope of the beach, the height of their camera, etc. Plus, most of the time they do their math wrong as well.
So, I definitely appreciate globe skepticism, and that will also be the topic of a future article of globe skepticism vs flat earther, as there are literally thousands of problems with the flat earth model that, even if one BELIEVES that their experiments conclude their is no curvature, to accept a flat earth model with the thousands of scientific impossibilities, absurdities, and improbabilities it has, is actually declaring that the round earth model requires thousands of times more evidence than a flat earth model requires, and that is patently irrational.