It is usually not important.
Astronomers live in a peculiar world.
Because light is the fastest messenger of information, we are only interested in where things are, and what they looked like, relative to some imaginary surface of information. NOW is telling me where they are. I don't care that my information is out of date by the hundreds of years the light took to get here. This applies to galaxies with spades. The distant galaxies we see whose images have been traveling to us for 10 billion years, show us what they looked like 10 billion years ago.