Lightning strikes TASS Cincinnati

["Michael Gutzwiller" <deepsky@fuse.net>]

Do not fear, this story has a happy ending but lightning did indeed strike
here.

I was on vacation when it happened and nobody was at home when lightning
struck a tree no more than 30 feet from the observatory.  Tom and I both
have too many trees for our observatory's own good though Tom has even more
than I do.

The first symptom of the problem was when I talked to my daughter when she
was home and I was still on vacation.  She said the ADSL connection to the
internet was not working.  We've had problems like that before but the
standard fixes did not work.  When I did get home I noticed that the ADSL
modem was connecting to the phone line but not the LAN in the house.  Then
Debby called me out back and showed me the damage to the tree.  Bark was
blown off in two strips all the way down the tree with one strip up to a
foot wide.  I then discovered that my whole network was non-functional.
While I have significant surge protection on the power line, the network had
only one surge protector and I made the mistake of unplugging it when I went
on vacation.  What that meant is that I essentially had a 50 foot antenna
leading from the observatory into my network.

It's taken me about 5 days to restore the network.  The known damage list so
far is:
1 ADSL modem
1 Router
1 Switch
3 Network cards
1 Serial communications card

The last one was the most worrisome since it was the communications card to
the Mark IV Stamp and I couldn't tell if it was the serial card on the
observatory's computer or the Mark IV itself or both.  I replaced the system
out in the observatory with a new (used) computer yesterday and was pleased
to see the Mark IV at least respond to commands again during the day.  Last
night I took data and was relieved to see that all is working.  The images
for both cameras came out fine.

Many thanks to Tom who has designed a system with enough safety margins to
make it through when so much else did not!


Mike G.