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Hi Gentlemen, This week we'll hold our LQS meeting on Thursday, June 23, at 2:00 PM Eastern. We'll take round-table reports and discuss a recent astro-ph preprint on an improved measurement of the distance to Cygnus X-1 by means of a radio frequency parallax measurement: Reid et al., "The Trigonometric Parallax of Cygnus X-1", arXiv:1106.3688 [astro-ph]. They present a measurement uncertainty of about 6% of the 1.86 kpc distance, an improvement of more than a factor of two over the previous result. I find it interesting that a direct, trigonometric distance measurement can be made at 6000 light-years. Note that one of the authors is from MIT. As usual, our call-in number the local ReadyTalk access number for your country (US: 866-740-1260, or check www.readytalk.com). Access code is 3144955. Thank you, --Ray