as a way to measure the distance to the stars. In 1792, Giuseppe Piazzi noticed the high proper motion when he compared his own observations of 61 Cygni with those of Bradley, made 40 years earlier. This led to considerable interest in 61 Cygni by contemporary astronomers, and its continual observation since that date. Piazzi's repeated measurements led to a definitive value of its motion, which he published in 1804. It was in this record he christened the system as the "Flying Star". Piazzi noted that this motion meant that it was probably one of the closest stars, and suggested it would be a prime candidate for an attempt to determine its distance through parallax measurements, along with two other possibilities, Delta Eridani and Mu Cassiopeiae. Parallax measurement A number of astronomers soon took up the task, including attempts by François Arago and Claude-Louis Mathieu in 1812, who recorded the parallax at 500 milliarcseconds (mas), and Christian Heinrich Friedrich Peters used Arago's data to calculate a value of 550 mas. Peters calculated a better value based on observations made by Bernhard von Lindenau at Seeburg between 1812 and 1814; he calculated it to be 470 ±510 mas. Von Lindenau had already noted that he had seen no parallax, and as Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve pointed out after his own test series between 1818 and 1821, all of these numbers are more accurate than the accuracy of the instrument used. Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel made a notable contribution in 1812 when he used a different method to measure distance. Assuming the orbital period of the two stars in the binary to be 400 years, he estimated the distance between the two this would require, and then measured the angular distance between the stars. This led to a value of 460 mas. He then followed this up with direct parallax measurements in a series of observations between 1815 and 1816, comparing it with six other stars. The two sets of measurements produced values of 760 and 1320 mas. All of these estimates, like earlier attempts by others, retained inaccuracies greater than the measurements. When Joseph von Fraunhofer invented a new type of heliometer, Bessel carried out another set of measurements using this device in 1837 and 1838 at Königsberg. He published his findings in 1838 with a value of 369.0±19.1 mas to A and 260.5±18.8 to B, and estimated the center point