There was even more to it. Cosmographers of the time were willing to consider the possibility that the stars were very far away, far enough to make parallax cha

There was even more to it. Cosmographers of the time were willing to consider the possibility that the stars were very far away, far enough to make parallax changes undetectable. The main stumbling point was that they assumed the stars would be similar in size to our sun, but based on naked-eye and telescopic measurements of the diameter of the “disk” of the stars (many taken by Brahe and Galileo themselves), any solution that explained the parallax effect would have resulted in enormous stars, and this they couldn’t accept. Eventually the measurements turned out to be an optical artifact. I read an entire book on this subject, published by a Catholic press. There seems to be an active interest in the Catholic science establishment in rehabilitating some of Galileo’s critics.