Efficient data mining in the X-ray sky background

The calculation of flux upper limits in the source-free ("background") regions of photon-limited images is complicated by instrumental and statistical modeling and requires non-trivial computational effort. We propose a scheme where the properties of source-free image regions are pre-calculated and catalogued in a compact form to allow rapid estimation of flux limits and statistical properties of the background. For the case of X-ray data, we examine the expected speed-up in massive all-sky queries resulting from such a system to pre-screen coordinate requests before running a full analysis.