Dear Chris,
Rebinning is always fraught; I would normally not allow a student to do it...
I thought you would say that! ;-) and I share your concern, actually that is the reason why we store ~8600 data points or more for a scan of 1200 eV. Don't mess with the raw data! But 8600 (or 22000...) is a significant oversampling. We could simply measure for a certain longer time per point, than read the counters and store the values. The results turned out to be less good, some weird technical reason. We could also sum up n points and divide the result by n, so that we would end with 8600/n data points in the final data file. In most cases that would certainly be ok, but information would be irretrievably lost. But, at some point one has to reduce the number of points and make use of all the counts that were collected within a certain reasonable interval like 0.5 eV or 0.05 Ang-1. But it looks as if artifacts might arise from doing it twice, first explicitly by using Athena's rebin function and than again implicitly by mapping the data onto the 0.05 Ang-1 grid. Cheers, Edmund