Perseid Meteor Streaks Above La Palma’s Roque de los Muchachos Observatory

Explanation: On August 15, a bright, colorful Perseid meteor streaked across the sky above the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands. The meteor trail appears beside the central Milky Way, where dark interstellar dust clouds and bright starlight rise above the horizon.

In the foreground of this fascinating celestial scene is a prototype mirror 23 meters in diameter belonging to the Large-Sized Telescope (LST-1). LST-1 is the first telescope built at the Northern Hemisphere site of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory.

With 198 hexagonal mirror segments and a large, high-efficiency pixelated camera, LST-1 is designed to detect extremely brief atmospheric flashes of visible light. Lasting about a billionth of a second, these flashes are caused by high-energy gamma rays from cosmic sources such as a distant active galaxy and gamma-ray bursts. That night, several individual mirror sections of LST-1 also reflected the atmospheric flash of the bright Perseid meteor.

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Tomorrow’s photos: Before and after