Sanduleak -69 202 (Sk -69 202, also known as GSC 09162-00821) was a magnitude 12 blue supergiant star, located on the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The star was originally charted by the Romanian-American astronomer Nicholas Sanduleak in 1970, but was not well studied until identified as the star that exploded in the first naked eye supernova since the invention of the telescope,[1] when its maximum reached visual magnitude +2.8.

[3] The discovery that a blue supergiant was a supernova progenitor contradicted the prevailing theories of stellar evolution and produced a flurry of new ideas about how such a thing might happen,[4] but it is now accepted that blue supergiants are a normal progenitor for some supernovae.

[5] The candidate luminous blue variable HD 168625 possesses a bipolar nebula that is a close twin of that around Sk -69 202.

It is speculated that Sk -69 202 may have been a luminous blue variable in the recent past, although it was apparently a normal luminous supergiant at the time it exploded.