What I'm wondering is why the alleged "first" picture of this kind is of a star 160,000 light years away. There are hundreds of millions of stars in that distance range from us. I suppose there may be a reasonable explanation having to do with optimal visibility or something, but my intuition is completely failing here.
>The RSGs in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) have the great advantage that their distances are much better known (50 kpc, Pietrzyński et al. 2013) compared to those of their Galactic counterparts. WOH G64 is the brightest RSG in the mid-infrared in the LMC, exhibiting a huge infrared excess with a high mass-loss rate on the order of 10−4 M⊙ yr−1 (Goldman et al. 2017). For this reason, it has been a subject of multiwavelength studies from the visible to the radio (e.g., van Loon et al. 1996; Levesque et al. 2009; Matsuura et al. 2016). Ohnaka et al. (2008) succeeded in spatially resolving the circumstellar dust environment of WOH G64 using the mid-infrared interferometric instrument MIDI at the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI).