[Enceladus] What am I looking at?, Weird distortion here! Options

[EDG]

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/raw/rawi...?imageID=216998



What's going on here? The limb of Enceladus looks like it's all melted like wax!

I'm going to hazard a guess at some kind of really strange image saturation from an over-bright Saturn maybe? If so, I've not seen that look so 'curvy' before.

The next image in the sequence is also strange: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/raw/rawi...?imageID=216997

[ZLD]

This looks like image bleed to me. The description tells us that both color wheels are set to clear so this is a straight black and white, with all recordable colors contributing. The affected regions in both photos appears to be roughly the same region along the edge of Saturn and is likely the most intense region in both photos, causing bleeding into the edges of Enceladus. Dropping the gamma and trying a few other tricks turns up little around the edges. Seems to be a case of overexposure.

After looking at some of the other photos taken on that date, it seems like the camera was possibly in need of a calibration as well.

[dilo]

Very simple explaination, indeed: CCD images suffer of smear in the direction of charge transfer when pixels are close to saturation. In this case, charge shift is vertical and saturation occurs on the brightest part of the Saturn limb...