XMM-Newton Science Analysis System: User Guide

4.12.2 Example of EPIC product generation: images, spectra & light curves

The following example illustrates a simple analysis session which aims to extract an image, spectrum and light curve of a point source within the field of view of a single EPIC camera taken in imaging mode.

It is assumed that a calibrated EPIC event list (either from the pipeline processing or from running the EPIC chain tasks) is present in the working directory and that the setup steps (cifbuild, odfingest and the definition of the SAS environment variables, see § 4.12.1) have already been performed.

The following analysis steps are described:

1. Create light curves to check for times of background flares.
2. Filter the EPIC event list to exclude bad events and periods of high background.
3. Create images of the EPIC data.
4. Extract source and background spectra for a bright point-like field source.
5. Create RMF and ARF files for this source.
6. Alternatively, make use of the especget meta-task to perform spectral analysis steps 4 and 5 in one go.
7. Prepare the spectra for further analysis with Xspec.
8. Create a light curve for the source.

Commands to analyse the spectrum using Xspec and the light curve using Xronos are beyond the scope of this document. Please, check the manuals of these programme packages and the SOC provided SAS data analysis threads (available from the SAS web page) for further info.