Using reliable trigonometric measurements , we find that the absolute magnitude of cataclysmic variables depends on the orbital period and de-reddened ( J - H ) _ { 0 } and ( H - K _ { s } ) _ { 0 } colours of 2MASS ( Two Micron All Sky Survey ) photometric system .
The calibration equation covers the ranges 0.032 ^ { d } < P _ { orb } \leq 0.454 ^ { d } , -0.08 < ( J - H ) _ { 0 } \leq 1.54 , -0.03 < ( H - K _ { s } ) _ { 0 } \leq 0.56 and 2.0 < M _ { J } < 11.7 ; It is based on trigonometric parallaxes with relative errors of ( \sigma _ { \pi } / \pi ) \leq 0.4 .
By using the period-luminosity-colours ( PLCs ) relation , we estimated the distances of cataclysmic variables with orbital periods and 2MASS observations and compared them with distances found from other methods .
We suggest that the PLCs relation can be a useful statistical tool to estimate the distances of cataclysmic variables .