The Vela pulsar is the brightest pulsar at radio wavelengths .
It was the object that told us ( via its glitching ) that pulsars were solid rotating bodies not oscillating ones .
Along with the Crab pulsar is it the source of many of the models of pulsar behavior .
Therefore it is of vital importance to know how far away it is , and its origin .

The proper motion and parallax for the Vela pulsar have been derived from 2.3 and 8.4 GHz Very Long Baseline Interferometry ( VLBI ) observations .
The data spans 6.8 years and consists of eleven epochs .
We find a proper motion of \mu _ { \alpha { cos } \delta } = -49.61 \pm 0.06 , \mu _ { \delta } = 29.8 \pm 0.1 \mbox { mas~ { } yr } ^ { -1 } and a parallax of 3.4 \pm 0.2 mas , which is equivalent to a distance of 293 _ { -17 } ^ { +19 } pc .
When we subtract out the galactic rotation and solar peculiar velocity we find \mu _ { * } = 45 \pm 1.3 \mbox { mas~ { } yr } ^ { -1 } with a position angle ( PA ) of 301 ^ { \circ } \pm 1.8 which implies that the proper motion has a small but significant offset from the X-ray nebula ’ s symmetry axis .