On August 15, this
perseid meteor
streaked through night
skies over the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos at
La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain.
The bright and colorful meteor trail was captured next to the central
Milky Way,
whose dark interstellar dust clouds and luminous starlight
reach above the horizon.
In the foreground of this tantalizing celestial scene is the 23 meter diameter
mirror of the prototype
Large-Sized Telescope
(
LST-1).
LST-1 is
the first telescope constructed at the
northern hemisphere site of the innovative
Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory.
With 198 hexagonal mirror segments and a
large, high-efficiency, pixelized camera,
LST-1 is designed to detect extremely brief,
atmospheric visible light flashes.
Lasting about a billionth of a second, the visible light
flashes are triggered by energetic gamma-rays
from cosmic sources such as
distant active galaxies
and gamma-ray bursts.
Of course, on that night some individual mirror segments
of LST-1 also reflected
the atmospheric flash of the bright perseid meteor.