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Description
We present measurements of the soft X-ray background (SXRB) OVII and OVIII intensity between l=120{deg} and l=240{deg}, the first results of a survey of the SXRB using archival XMM-Newton observations. We do not restrict ourselves to blank-sky observations, but instead use as many observations as possible, removing bright or extended sources by hand if necessary. In an attempt to minimize contamination from near-Earth solar wind charge exchange (SWCX) emission, we remove times of high solar wind proton flux from the data. Without this filtering we are able to extract measurements from 586 XMM-Newton observations. With this filtering, ~1/2 of the observations are rendered unusable, and we are able to extract measurements from 303 observations. The oxygen intensities are typically ~0.5-10 photons/cm^2^/s/sr (line units, L.U.) for OVII and ~0-5L.U. for OVIII. The proton flux filtering does not systematically reduce the oxygen intensities measured from a given observation. However, the filtering does preferentially remove the observations with higher oxygen intensities. Our data set includes 69 directions with multiple observations, whose oxygen intensity variations can be used to constrain SWCX models. After removing observations likely to be contaminated by heliospheric SWCX emission, we use our results to examine the Galactic halo.
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