Can You Perceive a Star That's No Longer There?

At Uncommon Descent, V.J. Torley has a superb post on the question of objects of perception. He raises a profound question: If perception of an object entails a genuine encounter with the object, how can we perceive a star that we know does not actually exist now? He uses the example of a supernova in a distant galaxy -- we see the star (a supernova), but we know, from astrophysics, that the star has actually disintegrated, and the only reason we perceive that it still exists is that the lig...