What is "scintillation" and are "qualified pilots" aware of it?
"Scintillation" is the flickering of starlight due to the turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere through which the light passes. It is also known as stars "twinkling."

The current version of the PHAK discusses a number of nighttime optical illusions, but not scintillation. It does discuss, however, autokinesis, which is a less well-known but similar illusion. I don't think it would be outrageous for a pilot who knows about scintillation to connect the two. After all, a pilot can discern the difference between a ground-based light source and a star because the star will scintillate and the ground-based light source will not. Maybe the PHAK should include it, given its interest in identifying false horizons created by lines of ground lights.

Someone knowledgable who observed the visual flicker of the Crab Pulsar would be able to easily tell that it wasn't scintillating because scintillation is random, whereas pulsar flickers are more precisely timed than atomic clocks.