Yea I also make animations of 10-15 frames, in flash and gif.
But most of the time they are eye candle stuff for websites.
That is exactly the thing I talkin'bout: instead of inserting the complete GIF-movie into your announce message, it co;d be much better to insert the short "eye-candy" (sorry, but not "eye CANDLE") with the link to complete version or even versions (QT, DivX, GIF...)
At home I have a dial-up modem connection (36-44Kbps), and the loading of complete 12Mib GIF required about a hour. Caching proxies rarely cache such large objects, so, reloading of the forum's page may require reloading of entire 12Mib thing. And it's not good.
Anyway, You did a great job.
One note: the Sun (bright, ray-emitting star) moves to right off Earth too fast and looks like it approaching to viewer. If we compensating Earth's rotation, then other stars also should move, but they are motionless.