========================================================================= "The First DIRECT Distance to a Detached Eclipsing Binary in M33" Dr. Alceste Bonanos DTM, Carnegie Institution of Washington, USA When: Wednesday, 21 December 2005 at 3:30pm Where: 2nd Floor Seminar Room I will present the first direct distance determination to a detached eclipsing binary found by the DIRECT Project in M33. DIRECT aims to measure accurate distances to M31 and M33 with detached eclipsing binaries and to eventually replace the current anchor galaxy of the extragalactic distance scale, the Large Magellanic Cloud, with the more suitable spiral galaxies M31 and M33. We derive a distance to M33 accurate to 8%. I will discuss the implications of our result for the value of the Hubble constant. ======================================================================== Alceste Bonanos obtained her undergraduate degree in Physics from Wellesley College in 2000 and her PhD in Astronomy from Harvard University in June 2005. She currently holds a "Vera Rubin" fellowship at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, DC. For more information on Alceste you may visit her web page at: http://www.dtm.ciw.edu/bonanos/