Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

- Scott Adams

The fact that we witness scenes sent directly from Saturn and Mars on a daily basis is astounding. Think about the intricacies of flight, control, and communication that obtaining these images entails. Most of these pictures are not only scientifically interesting, but aesthetically elegant as well--and that's a testament to high art and science, and to the talented people who perform it.

Of course, not every shot sent down from space will make it onto the cover of a brochure. A thousand things can, and do, go wrong in space photography, from tricky lighting conditions, to malfunctions on the spacecraft, to dropped signals on the way back to Earth.

Last year, I posted some interesting examples of deep space imagery with photographic flaws of one kind or another. I was taken with the quirky imperfections in those pictures, and I wasn't alone. So I've collected a few more of them, pulled directly from the planetary data archives.

None of these pictures are textbook examples of photographic composition or lighting, and you'll probably never seen them featured on a space agency web site. But most of them are not exactly "mistakes," either. They're simply raw, unprocessed files, or they're exposed in an unusual way in order to highlight a certain feature, or they're just one frame from a series of images taken to capture something at exactly the right moment.

Here's an example from Saturn. At first glance it might look like a throwaway shot because it's so overexposed. But it highlights the night side of the planet, where reflected ringshine is illuminating the cloud tops. Imagine the view in that night sky.