Download

Welcome to the download page of SPEX. The current version is 3.08.01, which was released on 2024-07-18. SPEX is available for Linux 64-bit (glibc >=2.31) and Mac OSX >=12 (Monterey). Please see the available downloads for Linux and Mac OS here:

SPEX 3.08.01 for Linux and Mac OS

SPEX on Docker

SPEX is also available on the Docker platform. It allows you to run SPEX on any system that runs the Docker engine. See our Docker page for more information.

SPEX on Zenodo

Most historical versions of SPEX have been published on Zenodo, which is a trusted repository for scientific data. The repository provides a long-term environment where research data and software can be found and be referred to. SPEX has a permanent digital object identifier (DOI) that will always point to the latest version of SPEX:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1924563

Referring to SPEX

Each version of SPEX has its own DOI, which links to the appropriate download files on Zenodo. This makes it a very suitable target to refer to in publications. If you use SPEX for your publication, then please refer to the DOI of the SPEX version that you use and this SPEX paper. For example, if you want to refer to SPEX version 3.08.00, then you can do it like this:

In this paper, we use SPEX version 3.08.01 (Kaastra et al., 1996; 
Kaastra et al., 2024).

The first reference (Kaastra et al., 1996) points to the conference paper: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1996uxsa.conf..411K. The second reference (Kaastra et al., 2023) points to the DOI of version 3.08.01 on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12771915

A BibTeX entry for version 3.08.01 can be obtained here.

Additional python tools

The SPEX package above contains the main SPEX program and a few auxiliary programs written mainly in Fortran. In addition, a python toolbox called Pyspextools is available that is installed separately. This package contains scripts and methods to convert OGIP spectra to SPEX format, response generators for simulations and a python interface to create SPEX user models. The documentation for pyspextools can be found here.

SPEX on social media

If you want to be kept updated on the developments of SPEX, then you can like our SPEX page on Facebook or follow our SPEX Twitter account.