One lucky shot
On August 15, photographer Jeff Dai captured a bright, colorful Perseid meteor streaking across the night sky above La Palma, in Spain's Canary Islands. Right next to it: the glowing center of the Milky Way, our own galaxy. NASA picked it as its Astronomy Picture of the Day.
The Perseids are a meteor shower that happens every August, when Earth passes through dust left behind by a comet. Those tiny bits burn up in our atmosphere as shooting stars.
The giant mirror in front
In the foreground there is a telescope called LST-1, with a mirror 23 meters wide, made of 198 hexagon-shaped pieces. It hunts for flashes of light that last about a billionth of a second, caused when powerful gamma rays from faraway galaxies hit our atmosphere.
The best detail? Some of the mirror's pieces also caught the reflection of the meteor.
Have you ever seen a shooting star? Where were you?
