                        Astronomy Picture of the Day

    Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our
      fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation
                    written by a professional astronomer.

                              2026 September 26

                        Mirrored Meteor and Milky Way
                  Image Credit & Copyright: Jeff Dai (TWAN)

   Explanation: 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.

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