Storm

There was a lightning storm in March which caused several problems. The lightning protection of the telescope and the service building worked fine (with the possible exception of the fuses in the controller for the lower hatch) but the phone lines where affected, which caused the destruction of a fax machine. For these lines the lightning protection was provided by the phone company but we will reinstall our own protection to avoid future problems.

However, the main problems were in the new FIES building, which shares its grounding with the telescope building. It is thought that the poor conductivity of the ground around the building combined with the relatively large distance to the grounding in the telescope building caused the discharges to not properly being diverted and affecting many parts in the FIES building (see below).