Six years of practical experience with the EXSAS package has led to a reasonably robust system that is running under seven different operating systems (including LINUX) and is used regularly by more than 300 ROSAT observers in 75 institutes world wide. Although the functionality of the package has been enhanced drastically during that period - now 150 000 lines of executable code in 1450 FORTRAN modules are accessible through about 200 EXSAS commands - there is still continuous need for new developments.
Compared to the last edition of the manual numerous changes, corrections and additions of the text have been done. A major effort was the production of a 'clean' Latex version of the manual that runs smoothly through the latex-to-html converter. Both the Latex and html versions are available via the net. Because of costs we do not intend to distribute printed versions of the new edition.
We hope that this version of the manual will again better support the analysis of your ROSAT data.
Ulrich Zimmermann
for the EXSAS development team
July 1996