F..9 February, 2007 (AE Version 3.125)

• A description of how anti-virus applications can slow down AE extractions has been added to this manual (§6.2).

• Time variability is now quantified in two ways: within each observation in the TIMING stage (§E.4), and across multiple observations in the MERGE_OBSERVATIONS stage (§7.8). Two plots are now produced showing light curves from multiple observations--one uses a separate set of axes for each observation (Figure 9), the other shows all observations on a single ``broken'' time axis (Figure 10).

• The TIMING stage (§E.4) now produces a ``grouped'' light curve (i.e. a light curve with unequal bin sizes) and computes the median energy of events in each time bin. Errors on those median energy statistics are now computed and plotted.

• This version of AE seems to be compatible with CIAO 3.4.

• A new optional input parameter, PBKFILE, has been added to support the ``Dead Area calibration'' capability recently added to CIAO (§E.3).

• TARA version 2007jan18 or later is now required!

• The AE distribution includes a version of an AstroLib routine (forprint.pro) which has a bug fix that has not yet been released in the AstroLib. Your IDL path should be set up so that the AE directory appears ahead of the AstroLib directory.

• The FINAL_PRODUCTS stage has been renamed to MERGE_OBSERVATIONS to better reflect its purpose.

• The MERGE_OBSERVATIONS stage must now be run prior to the CHECK_POSITIONS stage (Figure 8).

• The MERGE_OBSERVATIONS stage now will accept an optional observation name in situations where you wish to compute photometry, responses, etc. on a single observation but you have extracted multiple observations.

• We now recommend that exposure maps should be constructed with a pixel size of 1 sky pixel or smaller if the tools ae_better_masking or ae_better_backgrounds are to be used (§7.6.3, E.6).

• We've added to this manual example code for performing image reconstruction outside of AE (§7.9.5).