  The Vela pulsar is the brightest pulsar at radio wavelengths. It was the
object that told us (via its glitching) that pulsars were solid rotating bodies
not oscillating ones. Along with the Crab pulsar is it the source of many of
the models of pulsar behavior. Therefore it is of vital importance to know how
far away it is, and its origin.
  The proper motion and parallax for the Vela pulsar have been derived from 2.3
and 8.4 GHz Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observations. The data
spans 6.8 years and consists of eleven epochs. We find a proper motion of
$\mu_{\alpha {\rm cos}\delta}= -49.61 \pm 0.06, \mu_\delta= 29.8 \pm 0.1$ \myr
and a parallax of $3.4 \pm 0.2$ mas, which is equivalent to a distance of
$293_{-17}^{+19}$ pc. When we subtract out the galactic rotation and solar
peculiar velocity we find $\mu_* = 45 \pm 1.3$ \myr with a position angle (PA)
of $301^\circ\pm1.8$ which implies that the proper motion has a small but
significant offset from the X-ray nebula's symmetry axis.
