Star Stars · In Vela
Regor
Regor, γ² Velorum, is a blue-white star in Vela: the 34th brightest star in the night sky.
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- Constellation
- Vela
- Designation
- γ² Velorum
- Apparent magnitude
- 1.75 · 34th brightest star in the night sky
- Spectral class
- WC8 + O9I
- Distance
- 1,117 light-years
- Highest at midnight
- mid January
- Position (J2000)
- RA 08h 10m · Dec −47° 20′
About 79× brighter than the faintest star the eye can see. Gives off about 20,000 times the Sun's visible light. The light you are seeing left around 909.
When to see it
On the night of Wed 20 Jan 2027, when it is highest around midnight, on each city’s own clock:
| From | Rises | Highest | Sets |
|---|---|---|---|
| London GMT | Never rises | ||
| New York EST | 22:43 | 00:05 · 2° | 01:27 |
| Singapore GMT+8 | 19:22 | 01:15 · 41° | 07:08 |
| Sydney GMT+11 | 16:00 | 01:06 · 76° | 10:12 |
Common questions
- Can I see it from 50° north?
- No. From there it never rises: you would have to travel south of 42° north before it cleared the horizon at all.
- Can I see it from 35° south?
- Yes. It rises and sets, and at its highest it stands 78° up in the south.
- When is the best time of year to see it?
- Around mid January, when it stands opposite the Sun and is highest at midnight. It comes round about two hours earlier each month, so by late April it is highest in the early evening, and in late October not until the hours before dawn.
- How far away is it, and how bright?
- It is 1,117 light-years away, and shines at magnitude 1.75 in our sky. From that far, the Sun would be a star of magnitude 12.5: too faint for anything less than a telescope.
- Naked eye, binoculars or telescope?
- The naked eye, even from a city: at magnitude 1.75 it is brighter than the faintest stars a city sky still shows, about magnitude 4.5.
Look for
Start from Canopus: Regor is 18° east of it, a spread hand at arm’s length.
Look for
From 50° north it never rises; from 35° north it barely clears the horizon, at 8°; from the equator it climbs to 43°; from 35° south it climbs to 78°.
Science
Regor’s surface is about 12,400 K, some 6,600 K hotter than the Sun’s 5,772 K, so its light is strongest at about 230 nm, in the ultraviolet, past the violet end of what the eye can see, where the Sun’s is strongest at 500 nm. Moved to 33 light-years, the distance astronomers compare stars at, it would shine at magnitude −5.9, brighter than Sirius, the brightest star in our sky.
Did you know
Against Canopus, the brighter star the hop starts from: Canopus looks 8.9 times as bright as Regor in our sky, but Canopus is 309 light-years away and Regor 1,117 light-years, so side by side Regor would give off 1.5 times as much light as Canopus.
Science
Regor is the 149th nearest to us of the 156 stars on these pages with a measured distance. Its nearest neighbour among them in space is Naos, about 150 light-years from it; on our sky the two are 7.4° apart.
Look for
The Sun passes 64° north of Regor around late July, when it is highest at noon, in daylight: the weeks either side are its worst time of year. From 35° north it is above the horizon for about 5 hours a day and from 35° south about 19. It is 8° from the plane of the Milky Way, inside the band a dark sky shows.