system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Since stars have vastly variable distance from us, and the time for light to reach us varies per star, the position of the stars relative to each other we see must be wrong? Does this matter for astronomy? Do we calculate the real position between stars?
gpt
The Milky Way is small enough are stars move slow enough that this isn't too big a deal, and it's not too hard to correct for.

Stars orbit the Milky Way at about 250 km/s, less than 0.1% of the speed of light. We're orbiting at a similar speed to nearby stars, ±20 km/s or so. Stars on the other side of the Milky Way are moving sideways relative to us at about 500 km/s or so.

The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across. 500 km/s \* 100,000 years is less than 200 light years. So, for a star on the very far side of the galaxy, moving at the maximum speed relative to us, our error in its position is like 0.2% of the distance to the star. That's much smaller than the precision of our measurements.

Stars take hundreds of million years to orbit the Milky Way, so on a human scale, we can only detect movement in the nearest stars, and on that scale they're basically moving in straight lines.  Most of the stars you see in the night sky are within a few thousand light years, and many are within a hundred, so they're all pretty close and haven't moved much since they emitted their light. So it's pretty easy to do the maths to correct for the small error due to light travel time.