As a kid there was a military air base in the neighboring city, so fighter jets passed our home regally. It was always fascinating that the sound and the plane where on different locations. You could always hear them but it was hard to spot the actual plane in the sky. Now imagine if they jets where going faster then light and that light was a bit slower so we could see them. That would mean the visible position would be different then the physical position of the plane ...
There are some weird edge cases in physics where you can move faster than the speed of light. We don't have any means, yet, to move faster than light in a vacuum, but light slows down as it enters materials (0.75c in water, for example). One effect is Cerenkov radiation, which is light emitted when a charged particle moves through a medium faster than light does. You see this in nuclear reactors. It's basically a 'photonic' boom that happens in the wake of the moving charge.
Your scenario works for things that are far enough away that the travel time of the photon is significant. Another poster mentioned the Sun. While that example is wrong (the Sun moving), it's true that if the Sun was whisked out of existence, we wouldn't know about it for 8 minutes. An example of this is supernovae in very distant stars. We see the flash of the explosion many years after it happened.
Or you know, just things far away moving at normal speeds, like also happens with sound. The sun for example is not physically in the place it appears to be due to the 8 minutes of light travel time and the fact it moves about one diameter in two minutes.
You've got two mistakes here. First, the sun appearing to move a diameter in two minutes is due to the rotation of the Earth, not the relative motion of the Earth to the sun (that's obviously a year). This can happen even if the sun and the Earth are fixed in space (with the Earth still rotating about its center). So this certainly does not make the sun look like it is in the 'wrong' spot.
Secondly, even the motion of the Earth in its orbit around the sun does not cause an 8 minute delay in the apparent location of the sun. The location the sun appears is determined by the direction that its light rays are travelling when they hit Earth. Even with the Earth travelling through space, the light rays that it hits at every point are always pointing back to the exact physical center of the sun as if there Earth were not moving. Yes, those light rays left 8 minutes ago from the sun, but the ones that Earth hits now are the ones that were heading towards Earth's current position, not the ones heading to Earth's position 8 minutes ago. Hence they are pointed from the sun to the Earth's current position.
If you can't visualize this, then imagine a alien sitting in its space ship hovering fixed in space (relative to the sun) just next to Earth's orbit as Earth passes by. Both you and the alien shoot a bullet such that its velocity is going exactly back along a light ray from the sun. Clearly the aliens' bullet will reach the sun. But then so too must your bullet: both you and the alien matched the same ray of light so your bullets are actually travelling in exactly the same direction from the same starting point. So in that sense the ray of light that you see is pointed right at where the sun is right then.
Ok fine: The sun for example is not physically in the place it appears to be due to the 8 minutes of light travel time and the fact it moves about one diameter across the sky in two minutes.
I just feel that if you talk about where the sun appears to be you can infer from context that I talk about actual sky positions and motions, not the inferred global state of the solar system, but here we are.
Anyway, the central fact in my argument is that the light that reaches us from the sun has travelled for 8 minutes, and so shows us now^1 where the sun would have been on the sky^2 8 minutes ago if we then had observed it by superluminal means.
Now, that there are no superluminal means to observe the sun with (as far as we know) is not crucial to the point because there are other situations where one mode of observation carries older information than other. That is the example of observing^3 the distant air plane with sound waves, and then with the supersonic means of light waves. The sound waves emitted at a given point in time reach you after the light waves emitted at that same instant, and so it looks^4 like the plane is at a different position than the sound is coming from. Since most of us rely mostly on sight, the sound is judged to be erroneous, but clearly we could just as well pick the sound position to be the baseline, which we do for instance if the plane is hidden by a cloud.
Also, in the spirit of your objection, you are almost completely wrong, in an exact technical way, when you say that
> the light rays that it hits at every point are always pointing back to the exact physical center of the sun
Because the sun is so close, it is in fact NOT a point, but it resolves to a disk, and since most of the disk is not on the one (infinitesimally thin) light ray that points back trough "the exact physical centre of the sun", most of the light does not point exactly there.
1: By which I mean a given instant in time, and due to how close the sun is and our reasonable velocity relativity of simultaneity is not important
2: Here "on the sky" means what position in an earth co-moving sky coordinate system
3: Again, I am talking about the motion of objects across the sky, in an earth co-moving sky coordinate system. The various and important ways that the example objects differ are neglected if they do not matter for the observed motion in the sky.
4: That is, you see optical waves with your eyes and infer from that a specific sky position different from the one reconstructed by your brain based on the sound waves detected by your ears.
Uh, maybe the sun prefers to use the galactic standard of rest? Did you think of that? Maybe it likes to think of itself as an active and healthy star that takes care of itself and puts in the hours on the treadmill?
Anyway, I was talking about the motion on the sky, not in an arbitrary reference system.
