An image published as NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for September 26, 2026 shows a Perseid meteor crossing the night sky over the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos at La Palma in the Canary Islands, Spain, on August 15. The bright, colorful meteor trail appears beside the central Milky Way, whose dark dust clouds and starlight rise above the horizon.

In the foreground is the 23 meter diameter mirror of the prototype Large-Sized Telescope, LST-1, the first telescope built at the northern-hemisphere site of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory. It has 198 hexagonal mirror segments and a high-efficiency pixelized camera designed to detect extremely brief atmospheric flashes of visible light, lasting about a billionth of a second, triggered by energetic gamma-rays from sources such as distant active galaxies and gamma-ray bursts.

According to the accompanying explanation, some individual mirror segments of LST-1 also reflected the atmospheric flash of that bright Perseid meteor. The image is credited to Jeff Dai (TWAN).