Ok, so if light from a galaxy is propagating in all directions, and we're moving laterally to it:
https://openmedia.gallery/view/1788
So... if we want to look at that red galaxy, we view at one angle on the left, which we adjust as we move to the right... why would the speed of the light affect which direction we look to see the galaxy?
Whether photons are traveling at c or 0.3c, the galaxy is still in the same direction, is it not?
That diagram doesn't show the issue. The distance to the galaxy is much larger than your diagram shows, so all the photons from the galaxy are parallel. (There is no measurable parallax, in other words, even if you observe from opposite edges of the solar system.) So no, you don't adjust left and right as you move in one direction "past" the object. It's not a parallax issue.
Suppose you want to study the light from one particular distant galaxy, whose apparent width from the solar system is one arcsecond. We don't want to use any lenses or mirrors, because (you've argued) those can change the properties of the light we want to measure. So instead, we aim a long narrow tube directly at the galaxy, with our measuring device at the near end ("bottom") of the tube. By "aim" I mean that the tube is perfectly parallel to the direction the photons from that galaxy are moving through the solar system. The tube is black on the inside. Any photons from other directions outside the expected one-arcsecond field, even if they happen to enter the tube, will be absorbed by the inner wall of the tube and won't reach the sensor.
Let's say we make the inner bore of our tube one inch in diameter. To have a field of view of one arcsecond, the tube must then be about three and a quarter miles (17,000 feet) long.
Once a photon enters the tube, if it's traveling at c, it takes 17 microseconds to reach the sensor.
That's not a problem, as long as the tube is not moving laterally, perpendicularly to its length and to the direction the photons are traveling. But what if it does start moving in that manner, let's say left to right on your diagram, at a speed of, let's say, 7.6 km/sec.
Now imagine a photon from the distant galaxy enters the open end of the tube. It will reach the detector in 17 microseconds. But the tube moves its own width sideways every 3.3 microseconds. So long before any photon from the galaxy can reach the sensor, the left inner wall of the tube reaches it, and absorbs it.
What can we do about that? We can tilt the tube a little to the right (clockwise, in your diagram) so that, as each photon from the distant galaxy travels down the tube, the tilt counteracts the lateral movement of the tube, so that the moving photon stays the same distance from the walls of the moving tube. The angle we must tilt the tube is the arc tangent of the ratio of the tube's lateral velocity and c. That's about 5.2 arcseconds.
After the tilt (aka correction for aberration), the sensor at the bottom of the moving tube will again be detecting photons from the distant galaxy.
Several critical points here:
1. After the tilt, the tube will no longer be parallel to the direction those photons are moving. It will no longer be aimed precisely at the apparent position of the distant galaxy.
2. At that lateral speed, the amount of tilt required is significantly greater than the field of view of the tube itself.
3. That lateral speed in this example happens to be the orbital speed of the Hubble telescope. This will be important later.
4. That amount of tilt will only work for light that's traveling at c. If the light were traveling at 0.5c, for instance, it would still hit the wall of the tube by halfway down, and would need twice as much tilt (10.4 arcseconds) to be able to reach the sensor.
But twice the tilt wouldn't work for light that was traveling at c, or at, say, 0.8c. That light could only make it part way down the tube before hitting the
right wall. A given angle aberration correction only works for a specific speed (or a rather narrow speed range, at best) of photons.
And this will be important later: the longer and/or narrower the tube, the more constrained the speed range of photons will make it to the sensor.
Okay, so what if instead of moving laterally in a constant velocity, the tube were in orbit around the Earth? Note that regardless of the direction of the target it's aimed at, it cannot orbit the Earth without moving laterally to that direction most of the time. Not always at the maximum lateral velocity of 7.6km per second, but more often than not at greater than half that speed. And that relative lateral motion is reversing direction every half orbit.
So the tilt, the aberration correction, must be constantly changing to keep the target in the tube's field of view. This is not to keep the tube "aimed at" the target; quite the contrary! It's to tilt the tube this way and that as needed so that photons from the target that enter the tube don't hit the walls of the tube as those walls orbit at 7.6km/sec in different relative directions. (If the orbit were a perfect circle, and there weren't also other motions like the earth's around the sun to compensate for, the tilting motion would trace out an ellipse with each orbit).
But the fact remains that this ongoing correction only works if the light from the target is moving at (or very close to) the velocity the mission planners expected it to be.
That tube represents
one pixel of the Hubble's image. With two differences:
1. To accurately represent the Hubble's angular resolution, the tube should be at least ten times longer.
2. For the Hubble, if the aberration correction is wrong, light from a given pixel's target square tenth-of-an-arcsecond doesn't hit a wall of a tube and get absorbed. Instead, it lands on some other pixel nearby. Some other pixel that's supposed to be imaging a
different square-tenth-of-an-arcsecond piece of sky. In other words, the image blurs.
But if the speed of the light from objects at different cosmic distances within the same Hubble image is different, then the aberration correction cannot be right for all the objects imaged at the same time. Different photon speeds need different angles of correction. All long-exposure images of the deep field would show most of the deep field objects blurred.
That's why the Hubble deep field images completely falsify your conjecture.