Example of ellipse fitting (red line) to the spatial distribution of RR Lyrae stars (blue points). We used distances from this study estimated based on E (V – I) (left panel) and E (J – K_s) (right panel) color excesses. The green squares (used to derive ellipse parameters) and purple triangles represent the half-maximum and maximum of the GMM in a given bin (eleven bins between ℓ ≥ −5 and ℓ ≤ 5 deg). The different bar angles are outlined with dashed and dotted solid black lines. The dashed yellow and dotted black lines mark the measured and zero angles, respectively. The fit quality expressed using χ² are 0.36, and 0.40 for left and right panels, respectively.