PINTofALE was originally developed to analyze spectroscopic data from optically-thin coronal plasmas, though much of the software is sufficiently general to be of use in a much wider range of astrophysical data analyses. It is based on a modular set of IDL tools that interact with an atomic database and with observational data. The tools are designed to allow easy identification of spectral features, measure line fluxes, and carry out detailed modeling. The basic philosophy of the package is to provide access to the innards of atomic line databases, and to have flexible tools to interactively compare with the observed data. It is motivated by the large amount of book-keeping, computation and iterative interaction that is required between the researcher and observational and theoretical data in order to derive astrophysical results. The tools link together transparently and automatically the processes of spectral "browsing", feature identification, measurement, and computation and derivation of results. Unlike standard modeling and fitting engines currently in use, PINTofALE opens up the "black box" of atomic data required for UV/X-ray analyses and allows the user full control over the data that are used in any given analysis.

BASCS models spatial and spectral information from overlapping sources and the background, and jointly estimates all individual source parameters. The use of spectral information improves the detection of both faint and closely overlapping sources and increases the accuracy with which source parameters are inferred.

Automark models photon counts collected form observation of variable-intensity astronomical sources. It aims to mark the abrupt changes in the corresponding wavelength distribution of the emission automatically. In the underlying methodology, change points are embedded into a marked Poisson process, where photon wavelengths are regarded as marks and both the Poisson intensity parameter and the distribution of the marks are allowed to change.