  Image saturation has been an issue for several instruments in solar
astronomy, mainly at EUV wavelengths. However, with the launch of the
Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) as part of the payload of the Solar Dynamic
Observatory (SDO) image saturation has become a big data issue, involving
around 10^$ frames of the impressive dataset this beautiful telescope has been
providing every year since February 2010. This paper introduces a novel
desaturation method, which is able to recover the signal in the saturated
region of any AIA image by exploiting no other information but the one
contained in the image itself. This peculiar methodological property, jointly
with the unprecedented statistical reliability of the desaturated images, could
make this algorithm the perfect tool for the realization of a reconstruction
pipeline for AIA data, able to work properly even in the case of long-lasting,
very energetic flaring events.
