I spoke with Christina Eilers (MPIA) early yesterday about a possible self-calibration project, for stellar element abundance measurements. The idea is: We have noisy element-abundance measurements, and we think they may be contaminated by biases as a function of stellar brightness, temperature, surface gravity, dust extinction, and so on. That is, we don't think the abundance measurements are purely measurements of the relevant abundances. So we have formulated an approach to solve this problem in which we regress the abundances against things we think should predict abundances (like position in the Galaxy) and also against things we think should not predict abundances (like apparent magnitude). This should deliver the most precise maps of the abundance variations in the Galaxy but also deliver improved measurements, since we will know what spurious signals are contaminating the measurements. I wrote words in a LaTeX document about all this today, in preparation for launching a project.
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