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Astra Fireworks 2 This animation consists of the assembly of 370 CCD pictures. It shows the sky-motion of the 7 ASTRA geostationary satellites during 12 hours and 40 minutes (!). Every image lasted 60 seconds. The first picture began at 17h11m UT January 10th 1998 and the last picture ended at 05h51m UT of January 11th. During this time the satellites described those fantastic loops. I took the pictures with a C8, f/6.3 and a Hi-SIS22 CCD camera, in 2x2 binning mode. The telescope was fix, in effect one can see the horizontally star trails (North is up, East is left). The last frame is the result of the sum of the pictures. The field of view spans 11.3 x 9.3 arcminutes. The brightness of the satellites vary between 12 and 14mag.

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