3d scan of imperfect globe to a 2d Equirectangular Projection

[selden]

I'm confused by all this "baking" and stuff. Why not reproject your orthographic image as an equirectangular image and use that as a surface texture on a globe?

FWIW, I used this procedure with your most recent image:
Use IrfanView's "autocrop" menu item to eliminate the border (ImageMagic's "trim" refused to work correctly for me.)

use ImageMagic convert to scale the 748x757 image to be 1024x1024 (I'm rashly assuming that the squashing was linear)
( convert Globe_Game_cropped.png -geometry 1024x1024! GGs.ppm )

use MMPS to project from orthographic to equirectangular (2048x1024)
( project -i orthographic -lat 0 -long 0 -w 2048 -h 1024 -f GGs.ppm > GGso.ppm ; convert GGso.ppm GGso.png )

use Celestia to draw a globe with that surface texture.

Below are framegrabs of the final result. The first framegrab compares the globe drawn by Celestia to your most recent image. The second screengrab is just to show the distortion in the surface texture image at the borders, where they're stretched onto the surface of the sphere. The third picture is the equirectangular surface texture image that I used.