Katie Breivik (Flatiron) and I convene a weekly meeting at Flatiron for NYC-area astronomers to discuss and work on things we are going to do with the ESA Gaia DR3 and SDSS-V data. Today I showed people what Price-Whelan (Flatiron), Eilers (MIT), and I are planning on doing with the 108 (!) very low-resolution Gaia BpRp spectra, which will be released in DR3 this summer: We plan on making a much-improved version of this method for estimating spectrophotometric distances to stars but covering the whole HR diagram and with better overall data and precision (we hope). In the meeting today we discussed ways to validate our distances (which is hard!) and we discussed what interesting side things might appear as part of the project. One category, that Dalcanton (Flatiron) liked, is this: Since our method involves comparing stars to other stars in their neighborhoods in spectrophotometric space, we will automatically and unintentionally find unicorn stars that are unlike any others. Those will be interesting for follow-up.
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