geuis's comment pulled from reddit sounds right. I used to work with satellite data that looked at visible light, but my dataset was close to Earth. I can imag

geuis's comment pulled from reddit sounds right. I used to work with satellite data that looked at visible light, but my dataset was close to Earth. I can imagine that the relative brightness of the surface of Ceres is very very low compared to what I've worked with, so keeping that in mind, any spot that spikes above some threshold is going to saturate your image. My data set was in black and white and had an integer brightness range of 32767. The raw data hovered between 20000 and 32767 (unitless intensity) because the instrument I worked on was old, and had suffered degradation, leaving a stronger "dark current" that needed to be removed. General steps for processing involved: 1) subtracting noise from the raw data, which came via a number of different paths 2) median filtering raw image frames into a single composite image, this may involve some masking 3) removing large scale noise (in our case, stars, planets and the moon) 4) adjusting the data range for presentation (this is only done for looking at the images, not for actual processing) The last step is probably what's causing this bright spot to seem so bright. With a different range of values, Ceres would look like a dark dark grey disc, with a lighter grey spot where the very bright spot is visible. I'd like to know the actual surface brightness of that spot, if it looks to be the same brightness as the Sun's reflection off of ice at that distance, it would clear things up pretty fast. Ice could be subsurface ice, or it could be remnant from the actual impacting object, if it were a comet.