This specific argument has not yet been submitted in response to the brain-teaser. However, it is anticipated.

God is clearly willing to allow us to be deceived by the efforts of evil and to deceive ourselves into rejecting Him. That is the nature of free will.

In addition, this complaint certainly has the force of history on its side. Knowledge about the natural world is always changing.  Usually the change is in the nature of increasing or improving knowledge. However, there have certainly been mistakes in the past and will continue to be mistakes in the future. The over-all process of change is not an indictment of the validity of scientific process, but rather affirmation of its ability to change and correct itself to accommodate new findings (and sometimes radical changes, al la Kuhn's paradigm shifts). When that happens the physical causes/effects have not changed, but rather our understanding and interpretations of those causes/effects. It's called growth. God encourages us to grow in knowledge as a part of our maturity -- Jesus did!

Having said that, the fact that astronomy continues to learn about the heavens in no way argues or supports a notion of God intentionally doing things to deceive those who are seeking truth. Or more specifically, that God was deceiving astronomers before 1987 concerning Sanduleak's existence, and hence they might be deceived concerning astronomical ages now. They might be mistaken about astronomical ages, but Sanduleak doesn't argue that God is deceiving them into being mistaken.

Since about 1940 it has been known by astronomers that the Large Magellanic Cloud (which contains Sanduleak) was about 170,000 light years from earth. Sanduleak was not cataloged until well after that. Prior to 1987 no one, other than astronomers, had seen the star named Sanduleak. It was invisible to the naked eye.

Astronomers understand that they are never seeing the present but only the past.  It is frequently correctly observed that no-one witnessed the creation. (You might find it surprising to learn that astrophysicists agree with that as a matter of quantum physics.) However, the only thing astronomers can observe is the past, they never see the present. No astronomer thought the Sanduleak starlight being received on any given day prior to seeing the supernova indicated a star actually existed on that day of observation. Rather, the starlight only indicated that the star existed in the observed state 170,000 years earlier. There was no deception by God at all in allowing the astronomers to see starlight coming from that position from a distance of 170,000 light years. This general understanding concerning the effect of the finite speed of light on astronomical measurements has been understood since Gallileo first invented the telescope. Astronomers have always known light was fast, they just didn't know how fast! But because light has a finite speed, it is obvious that things seen at great distances are being seen as they were, not as they are.

Permit me an analogy. A duck hunter draws down to fire on a flight of ducks. Though he sees the duck at postion A now, he knows that the duck will be at a different postion B by the time the shot arrives at the duck. So he aims ahead appropriately -- if he hopes to have duck roast that night!

Astronomers do essentially the same thing in reverse. They know where the starlight is when it arrives at their telescope, so they know from where and when it left from its source.

By the time the hunter's shot actually strikes the duck, the hunter may have already lowered the empty gun. From the perspective of other nearby ducks in the flight, when the ducks know they were shot at and turn to look at the hunter, the hunter no longer appears to have been shooting at them. In terms of SN1987a, we are the ducks. By the time we turned to look, the star had lowered its sights from us. It is no longer in the same state as when the light (the shot) left the star. The astronomer is no more deceived by SN1987a than the ducks are. The ducks know it was those hunters who did the shooting and quickly divert to avoid any further risk.

We still don't know what SN1987a looks like today. We only know what it looked like 170,000 years ago when it went supernova. To find out what it looks like to today (in year 2000 AD), we will have to wait around another 170,000 years. The ones who can actually see this physical evidence (astronomers) understand this quite well. They sense no deception on God's part in this toward's them at all. The only deception for them would be if a star at that distance was not in fact of the minimum age to correspond to the measured distance. Then they would think something fishy was up. However, this is not a problem for SN1987a. Since this is a star which is dying, it is much older than the required minimum age of 170,000 years. Typical star lifetimes (given mass/fuel cycle constraints) are in the range of a billions of  years.