The southern star Eta Carinae had a lot to do with creating all the fuss. Eta Carinae, you see, had been undergoing astonishing eruptions since the 1830s; eruptions so spectacular that no one could satisfactorily explain these mysterious convulsions until the Hubble Telescope had been built and called upon to take a look. What Hubble showed was a mind-boggling, bipolar explosion ... and in progress, no less. It was immediately apparent that the amount of matter being flung out into space had to come from a star so massive that no one had ever dreamed a star this big could even exist; a star at the very limits of stability and obviously unable to hold itself together.
An LBV is so big that it is right at the razor's edge of stability. And, because of its size, its nuclear-reactor furnace is operating at maximum power. It needs all the energy it can muster just to delay its cataclysmic finale. This star lives in the fast lane. And it dies quickly.
Sanduleak's Star, a relatively unknown star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, was an LBV. It was monstrous, it was blue, and it was unstable. But at the time, astronomers only considered big old red gas-bags (like Betelgeuse) as supernova candidates. So everyone was astounded when Sanduleak's Star blew up suddenly in February, 1987. But it was only doing its thing, really.
Therefore, angry giants like Eta Carinae, P Cygni, and Rho Cassiopeiae, just to name a few of the naked-eye LBVs up there, deserve watching.