ATSAL makes it easier to perform spectroanalysis, by operating as a layer above traditional analysis programs such as XSPEC. ATSAL keeps track of some of the bookkeeping details, and communicates with one or more analysis sessions in order to perform more operations in parallel.
ATSAL employs notebooks which contain tools that perform steps of an analysis. Notebooks serve as a complete record of an analysis (or at least the subset that you wish to preserve), as a front end for experimenting with alternatives, and as a program whose steps are executed in sequence when the refresh command is issued.
Warning: ATSAL’s built-in help has not been written yet: this is just a collection of snippets.