A flame from a street lamp is intese enough to "catch the atmosphere" but a tail light isn't?
Perhaps you should examine the difference between a tail light and a head light as to why one would be more scattered than the other. Also, ask yourself why soldiers in the field read maps at night with red flashlights.
Tom Bishop has written, rewritten and re-rewritten every known law of optics, in the hope that something will pass even the simplest scrutiny, without success. The most direct rule that he forgets is that any process that magnifies an image also directs the available light to a larger area, making the image dimmer. If any of his ideas had any chance of being right, the sun and all the celestial objects would be at least eight times dimmer when close to the horizon compared with when close to the zenith, just because that magnification makes the same photons cover a larger area.
Anyone who has used a telescope or a microscope is familiar with this: the larger the magnification, the dimmer the image. And it conforms to one of the most basic rules of physics: the conservation of energy. The energy (in this case a ray of light) can be directed to a small area or a large area, but the total amount of energy stays the same.
In the times of Rowbotham, when telescopes were a luxury and even proper correction glasses were not available to everyone, arguments about glare and scatter could fool more than one. But in our age you can look at the sun, moon or even galaxies with an affordable but good telescope on any part of the sky with no scatter, no glare.