Anne Medling

Grad Student

Astronomy & Astrophysics, UC Santa Cruz

astrophysics made simple

I've recently gotten married! Note the name change: until this year I published under my maiden name (Anne Rajala).

CV and Publications

Curriculum Vitae (pdf) (old old old - to be updated soon)

Marino, A. F. et al. 2008, eprint arXiv:0808.1414 (accepted to A&A)
Rajala, A., et al, 2005, PASP, 117, 132 (pdf)
Rajala, A., et al, 2004, BAAS, 36, 1464
Rajala, A., Fox, D.B., & Gal-Yam, A. 2004a, IAU Circ., 8386, 4 (web)
Rajala, A., Fox, D.B., & Gal-Yam, A. 2004b, ATel, 320 (web)
Rajala, A., Fox, D.B., & Gal-Yam, A. 2004c, IAU Circ., 8387 (web)
Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship paper, 2003 (pdf)

Research Experience

At UCSC:

Upon arriving at UCSC, I started working with Claire Max, looking at NGC 6240 - a pair of colliding galaxies, each with a black hole in its nucleus. I am using OSIRIS (Keck's IFU spectrometer) to probe stellar dynamics inside the sphere of influence of the black holes. Paper in prep!

In Italy:

After graduating from Caltech, I spent a year in Padova on a Fulbright Scholarship working with Giampaolo Piotto's globular cluster group. I primarily spent my time looking at archived UVES spectra of globular cluster members to create accurate radial velocity catalogs. Paper in prep!

At Caltech:

From 2005-6, I was working at the Michelson Science Center (now NExScI), part of IPAC with Drs. Gerard van Belle and David Ciardi,monitoring the open cluster NGC7789 with the Robotic Palomar 60-inch Telescope, aim to pull interesting science out of precise differential photometry.

In 2004-5, I had the privilege of working with Drs. Derek Fox and Avishay Gal-Yam, using the robotic Palomar 60-inch telescope to quickly obtain photometry for newly-discovered supernovae. The photometry was then analyzed to suggest a constraint on the supernova's type, often before spectra could be obtained and analyzed. Check out our website here.

During the summer of 2003, I worked under Prof. George Djorgovski and Dr. Ashish Mahabal with the intent of creating a smooth panoramic image of the entire northern sky by mosaicking DPOSS images. This is nontrivial because the nonuniform gradients that exist in each image prevent a simple mosaic from smoothing into a single image. Check out the final paper here.

Links

UCSC Astronomy
UCSC Grad/Postdoc Christian Fellowship
Blacker Hovse
More Blacker Hovse
Out of Context A Cappella
Caltech Astronomy
Caltech
amedling [at] ucolick [dot] org
page updated 15.oct.2008