If you've ever tried photography, you know that not every picture can be a prize winner. Sometimes, no matter how carefully you prepare, there's not enough light, or the sun flares in the lens, or the model blinks. Of course, there is some comfort in the fact that even top professionals face the same problems every now and then.

Even when it comes to machines that people have used to create some of the most unforgettable images in history, robotic spacecraft in deep space, not every shot that comes down to Earth is ready for the cover of National Geographic. In fact, some of the better ones still require a little bit of clean-up, whether it's removing a spot of digital noise or correcting color to more closely match what you'd see with your own eye if you could stand on Mars. Some of the pictures are just disasters.

All photography in space faces challenges. Many of these are the usual questions of exposure, framing, and focus, but complicated by extreme changes in lighting conditions, and cameras mounted on platforms that are traveling at thousands of kilometers per hour relative to their subjects. Others problems are endemic to space travel, such as cosmic rays and other forms of radiation interfering with the camera sensor, not to mention the glitches that can crop up in the custom computer systems on board the spacecraft or somewhere else along the line within the Deep Space Network that carries the signals.

Even so, when you're talking about our handsome Solar System, even the throw-away pictures offer their own kinds of rewards. Consider the following set of raw or very lightly processed images that I've come across in the archives. All of them suffer from one photographic malady or another. I'm still glad I saw them.