Distance to the Cygnus Loop from Hubble Space Telescope imaging of the primary shock front

We present a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 narrowband Ha image of a region on the northeastern limb of the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant. This location provides a detailed example of where the primary blast wave first encounters the surrounding interstellar medium. The filament structure is seen in exquisite detail in this image, which was obtained primarily as an EARLY ACQuisition image for a follow-up spectroscopic program. We compare the HST image with a digitized version of the POSS-I red plate to measure the proper motion of this filament. By combining this value for the proper motion with previous measurements of the shock velocity at this position we find that the distance to the Cygnus Loop is 440(-100)(+130) pc, considerably smaller than the canonical value of 770 pc. We briefly discuss the ramifications of this new distance estimate for our understanding of this prototypical supernova remnant.