The Solar Neighbourhood XI: The trigonometric parallax of SCR 1845--6357

We present a trigonometric parallax for the nearby star SCR1845–6357, an extremely red high proper motion object discovered by Hambly et al. (2004) and identified via accurate photoelectric photometry and spectroscopy to be an M8.5 dwarf with a photometric parallax of $4.6\pm 0.8$ pc by Henry et al. (2004). Using methods similar to those described in Deacon & Hambly (2001) we have derived a full astrometric solution from SuperCOSMOS scans of eight survey and non–survey Schmidt photographs held in the United Kingdom Schmidt Telescope Unit plate library. We calculate the trigonometric parallax to be $\pi =282\pm 23$ mas yielding a distance of $3.5\pm 0.3$ pc which implies an absolute K${}_s$ magnitude of 10.79. This distance calculation places SCR1845–6357 as the 16th closest stellar system to the Sun.