Astronomers often tell us that when we turn our telescopes to the sky we are looking into the past. The stars we are seeing are so distant that it takes the light radiated from them many thousands, millions, even billions of years to reach us. What we are seeing, the astronomers tell us, are stars as they appeared many millennia ago.
Though these statements are largely true, they are not entirely accurate, and they can be misleading. What we see when we look through a telescope, or at a picture of a star taken through a telescope, is not the star itself, but an appearance of the star. Until we looked at it, the star had no appearance. It was not until we resolved the otherwise transparent light into colors with our eyes that the appearance of the star as we see it happened. And of the infinite number of appearances possible for the star, any particular appearance is specific to our relationship with it. Each condition of the observer imposes a bias upon the appearance of the star.
To the naked eye, seen from the surface of planet Earth, the star appears as a tiny pinpoint of bright light. The atmosphere of our Earth distorts the light of the star, causing it to appear to twinkle. The telescope also distorts the light, gathering it within the lens and focusing it to the eyepiece, causing the appearance of the star to magnify for our eyes. Magnified through a telescope, the star appears larger and reveals complex structures which are not part of the naked-eye appearance.
The motion of the Earth makes it a very tricky and finely-tuned process to keep the telescope continually lined up with the object being observed. This makes taking photographs and producing other kinds of images from a telescope an art form, one requiring skill, practice and virtuosity. The images are often enhanced to bring out details, and this fact makes the light of the stars the raw material, like canvas and paint, to the astronomer/artist. Which means that when we see an image of a star reproduced in a book or a magazine, what we are seeing is a representation of that star, as the astronomer/artist thinks it should look, magnified, then reduced, and screened through various printing processes to make the image fit the format of the particular publication - all of this happening in the vast here and now.
If some sighted being lives on a planet orbiting this star, that sighted being will see an entirely different appearance. If it is a white star seen through an atmosphere heavy with red dust, the star may appear red (assuming the sighted being has eyes like ours); if it is a blue star, it may appear purple. If it is a blue star seen through a yellow atmosphere, it may appear green. If the planet is in a highly elliptical orbit, the star will appear to grow in size and dwindle, as the planet approaches and moves away. Then again, if the star is seen from the surface of a rapidly rotating asteroid, it will appear not as a pinpoint, but perhaps as a ribbon of light tracing shining arcs, circles or ellipses in the sky.
And so on. Each of these appearances of the star happens only when some observer is invoking it. No observer, no appearance. Until the light has been seen, it is transparent. So, though it appears to be true that the light of the stars has often taken many millennia to reach our neighborhood, it is not entirely accurate to say we are seeing the stars as they appeared many millennia ago. What we are seeing is in large part our own representation of the star, the ancient star as we make it appear today.