Adrian Price-Whelan is building a next-generation spectrophotometric distance estimation method that builds on things that Eilers, Rix, and I did many moons ago. Price-Whelan's method splits the stars up in spectrophotometric space and builds local models for different kinds of stars. But within those local patches, it is very similar to what we've done before, just adding some (very much) improved regularization and a (very much) improved training set. And now it looks like we might be at the few-percent level in terms of distance precision! If we are, then the entire red-giant branch might be just as good for standard-candlyness as the red clump. This could really have a big impact on SDSS-V. We spent part of the day making decisions about spectrophotometric neighborhoods and other methodological hyper-parameters.
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