Re: Are the postions of the stars we see from earth really where they are.

You are quite right, in a way: when we look at a star 1000 light years away, we are seeing it as it looked 1000 years ago. And given that nearby stars are moving at something like 40 kilometers per second relative to us, the above star will travel perhaps a trillion kilometers (or one-tenth a light year) in 1000 years. On the sky, this would be an angular shift of about 20 arcseconds -- imperceptible to the human eye. This is called proper motion.

However, it may not be terribly meaningful to say that the star is not "really there" -- this way of thinking involves knowing the position of the star instantaneously, something that is impossible according to relativity. (Two events can only be said to be "simultaneous" if they occur at the same point in space). To us, the star does not exist until its influence (gravity, light, explosive remnants) reach us at the speed of light (or slower).

Anyway, given that one wants to imagine a star's "real position", the number given above for the angular shift (20 arcsec) applies to all nearby stars: a closer star will have had less time to move, but its nearness will increase the apparent shift by exactly the same degree. Thus, all nearby stars have "real positions" which are the same as their apparent positions, as well as the eye can see. But some stars and galaxies which are much farther away may have much larger relative velocities, and thus have "real position" discrepancies which are perceptible to the naked eye (about one-tenth the diameter of the Moon). This may be true for the Magellanic Clouds (satellite galaxies of our own which can be seen from our Southern Hemisphere), though I don't have the numbers handy.

Also, if you wait long enough, you can watch the shifting (proper motion) of a star occur. For nearby, fast-moving objects, the proper motion is the greatest: Barnard's Star has the largest known (in 180 years, it will have moved a distance on the sky equal to the diameter of the Moon). In 100,000 years, we would expect the constellations to look very different from how we see them now on Earth (the Big Dipper, Orion, etc.: they are all snapshots of a fleeting moment in our Galaxy).