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Astra Fireworks This picture shows the track of the seven geostationary satellites ASTRA during 12 hours and 40 minutes (!). It is the result of the simple superposition of 368 120-seconds CCD images. 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 field of view spans 12.8 x 10.5 arcminutes. The brightness of the satellites vary between 12 and 14mag.

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