Vela
Vel · genitive Velorum · southern sky
At a glance
- Catalogued stars
- 215
- Visible to the eye
- 215 stars
- Brightest star
- Gam2Vel (1.75)
- Best seen
- February
- Declination span
- -55.0° to -40.5°
- Nearest star
- Psi Vel · 61.4 ly
Visible from everywhere south of about 35°N.
When and where to look for Vela
Vela crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around February, which makes the months from January to March the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations -55.0° to -40.5°, so visible from everywhere south of about 35°N.
The quickest way to find it is to open the live AR sky map and point your phone at the sky — if Vela is above your horizon right now, its figure is drawn in the position it genuinely occupies above you.
Brightest stars in Vela
| Star | Mag | Type | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gam2Vel | 1.75 | WC8 + O9I | 1,117 ly |
| AlsephinaDel Vel | 1.93 | A1V | 80.6 ly |
| SuhailLam Vel | 2.23 | K4Ib-II | 544.5 ly |
| MarkebKap Vel | 2.47 | B2IV | 572.2 ly |
| Mu Vel | 2.69 | G5III SB | 117.2 ly |
| HD 82668 | 3.16 | K5III | 238.9 ly |
Magnitude runs backwards: lower numbers are brighter, and anything below about 6.5 is beyond the naked eye under a dark sky.
What Vela is made of
The catalogue lists 215 stars within Vela, of which 215 are magnitude 6.5 or brighter — the limit of what an unaided eye picks up under a genuinely dark sky. The rest need binoculars or a telescope.
Spectral make-up
Spectral class is a temperature ordering, running from O at around 30,000 K down to M below 3,500 K. A constellation is a direction, not a group, so this is simply what happens to lie along that line of sight.
The closest catalogued star in this direction is Psi Vel at 61.4 light years. The most distant is HD 86466 at roughly 2,673 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.