Extinction, the elephant in the room that hinders optical Galactic observations

Abstract

Extinction is the elephant in the room that almost everyone tries to avoid when analyzing optical/IR data: astronomers tend to find a quick fix for it that the referee will accept, but that does not mean such a solution is correct or even optimal. In this contribution I address three important issues related to extinction that are commonly ignored and present current and future solutions for them: [1] Extinction produces non-linear photometric effects, [2] the extinction law changes between sightlines, and [3] not all families of extinction laws have the same accuracy.Comment: 38 pages, 15 figures. To appear in the edition of the Central European Astrophysical Bulletin dedicated to the proceedings of the Hvar Stellar Meeting 202