Derivation of the mass, luminosity, and metallicity of AQ Leo from the pulsational and evolutionary models. The labels show the corresponding metallicities, and the color-coding is also applied to the pulsation models. A shift of ±0.003 in log L is used for the pulsation models to clearly show the metallicity effect (no shift for [M/H] = − 1.88, +0.003 and −0.003 for [M/H] = − 2.48 and −1.54, respectively). The inset shows the variation in (M, L) distance metric (Eq. (11)) as a function of the metallicity. All models have the same effective temperature of 6595 K, and the metallicities are scaled with Z_⊙ = 0.0152.