So this drawing right here this 1000 LY is now this 1000 LY over here. so this is our local vicinity of the sun and once again the word local is used in a very liberal way at this point so this right here is a 1000 ly if your sitting here and your looking at an object that is sitting (let me do this in a darker color) if we're sitting here on earth and we're looking at an object sitting here that's 500 LY away we're looking at it as it was 500 years ago becasue the light that is reaching our eyeballs right now or our telescopes right now left this guy over here 500 yrs ago. in fact he's not even going to be there anymore he'll probably have moved around a little bit. 