NASA scientists use Photoshop to sharpen images? That's practically more surprising than support for the Bush-was-wired contention.
On the one hand, Photoshop is incredibly powerful. As you probably know, there's not much you'd want to do to an image that you can't do with Photoshop, and it's standard fare at major publications.
On the other hand, I take your point: NASA should have some wacky shit we can't even imagine, but the article takes pains to point out that he worked at home, off the clock.
I think most of NASA's special photoshopping consists of coloring elements identified with a spectrometer and adjusted for z-index.
The 'enhanced' version looks like a flyswatter to me. Now the only question is .... why?
Via a commenter on Apostropher, here's a great explanation of the bulge.
And on a sort of related note, I went to an early Halloween party last night and there was a guy there dressed completely in black with blackface on and his hair dyed or sprayed black. He was wearing an ipod and he had a large piece of cardboard painted orange attached to his back as a background.