SAS home . ... EPIC background spectra are normally extracted from regions of the observation field-of-view, once "contamination" due to individual discrete celestial sources has been removed. ... In order to cope with this situation, blank sky event lists can be downloaded from the XMM-Newton Science Operations Center web site. ... It is in principle possible as well to extract background spectra from blank field event lists, if the spectrum accumulation regions are defined in sky coordinates. ...