Requiem for Relativity

What happens in the case of the sun setting/rising 5 minutes before we see the effect? An observer on Earth is spinning and you have not factored that motion in have you?

Does this effect generate a red shift in the spectrum of stars??

Where it relates to the sun, one can look at what happens during Solar Eclipses.

What Tom Van Flandern wrote on this site:
"We find that maximum eclipse occurs roughly 381.9 seconds of time, on average, before the time of gravity maximum."
(the time of gravity maximum = when Sun, Moon and Earth are exactly aligned)

This implies that light arriving from the sun is reaching us with an aberration of 20.5 arcsec.

This is often explained to as: "we observe the sun where it was 8 minutes ago and that's why we observe the sun with this exact aberration".
I would challenge this as follows: Suppose the Earth would not be rotating and not have an inclination; then an observer on the Equator at noon time would always observe the sun in the exact same perpendicular position at any moment during the day.

So my take on this is that the light arriving from the sun must be reaching us through a curved path.

Where it relates to the motion of the observer on Earth: this is the "Diurnal aberration", which has a maximum of 0.32 arcsec (on the Equator).
For the observer in Florida, the Moon/Jupiter were relatively low in the sky so I would expect just a minor effect.

I would not expect this to create a red shift / doppler effect.

It seems to me this is mostly geometry of objects moving in 3D space. Is that correct? And if so, would a curved path be needed as the only means to explain the effects? Would the effect be different without curved paths? And what force is involved to cause the curving path? If the path of light curves when will it curve 360 degrees and return to where it started?

A curved path is indeed required to explain why a star or planet can become visible when we know that there is an other object in between the obserer and the point where the light originated from (considering a straight line).

The effect without a curved path:
Relative to the object that is occulting:
- at one end: star/planet shows overlayed with the object
- at the other side: star/planet disappears before it has reached the border of the object

There is no 'force' involved causing the curved path in the same way there is no 'force' involved with stellar aberration occuring locally or with the bending of light due to gravitation. The cause of the curving must be closely related to the very nature of the propagation of light.

For someone travelling at the speed of light (tangential to the star being observed), the observed aberration would be 45 degrees (independent if the medium surrounding this observer is travelling at the same speed or not). Travelling beyond the speed of light would still pose a limit of 90 degrees. So a 360 degrees turn doesn't look like an option...