  Saturated stellar images on digitised photographic plates are many times
greater in area than the `seeing disk' seen in unsaturated CCD images. Indeed
the flux profile of a bright star can be traced out for several degrees from
the star's centre. The radius of the saturated stellar image can often be
directly related to the magnitude of the star, a fact well known and exploited
in iris photometry. In this work we compare the radial flux profile of stars in
the approximate range B ~9 to ~13 mag, obtained from scans of plates from the
Bamberg Sky Patrol archive, with a profile of the form measured by King. We
show that simple aperture photometry of saturated stellar images, obtained from
photo-positives of scanned photographic plates, yield data that are in
agreement with simulations using a (saturated) synthetic stellar radius
profile. Raw plate magnitudes from this aperture photometry can be easily and
satisfactorily transformed to standard magnitudes, as demonstrated in a recent
study carried out by the current authors.
