The key term is 'close-up' here. Some context: Edwin Hubble [...] in 1925 [...] identified extragalactic Cepheid variable stars for the first time on astronomi

The key term is 'close-up' here. Some context: Edwin Hubble [...] in 1925 [...] identified extragalactic Cepheid variable stars for the first time on astronomical photos of Andromeda [...] In 1943, Walter Baade was the first person to resolve stars in the central region of the Andromeda Galaxy.—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_Galaxy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_Galaxy The List of stars with resolved images (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stars_with_resolved_images https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stars_with_resolved_im...) contains all those stars starts (unsurprisingly, on hindsight) with the Sun of which the first photograph was made in 1845; the next star to be visible on a photograph as a disk, not a point, was only made in 1993. I grew up in the knowledge that all stars (except for the Sun) are too far away for them being resolved; that became obsolete 30 years ago. Sadly, the list ends with 2014 and does not (yet?) include the new observation. So yeah, even big, close stars like Betelgeuse (1995) are hard to resolve.