Toward a VLBI resolution of the Pleiades distance controversy
  The Pleiades is the best studied open cluster in the sky. It is one of the
primary open clusters used to define the `zero-age main sequence,' and hence it
serves as a cornerstone for programs which use main-sequence fitting to derive
distances. This role is called into question by the `Pleiades distance
controversy' - the distance to the Pleiades from Hipparcos of approximately 120
pc is significantly different from the distance of 133 pc derived from other
techniques. To resolve this issue, we plan to use Very Long Baseline
Interferometry to derive a new, independent trigonometric parallax distance to
the Pleiades. In these proceedings we present our observational program and
report some preliminary results.
