Schematic overview of the region around Vela X. The star marks the position of the Vela pulsar PSR B0833-45. The light-grey area indicates the region 0.8° around the centre of the VHE γ-ray emission. The surrounding cross-hatched ring has an outer radius of 1.2°. The black dots mark the pointing positions that allow background estimation in reflected mode and which were chosen for the spectral analysis of the Vela X outer region (the cross-hatched ring). The line-filled rings are the associated reflected off-source regions. The two boxes are used to extract flux profiles (which are shown in Fig. 6), where the arrows indicate the direction of the slices (as explained in Sect. 3.3). The position of the nearby SNR Vela Junior (Aharonian et al. 2007) is also shown.