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The Trinity Demonstrator is a proof of concept prototype for the Trinity Neutrino Observatory, which is sensitive to astrophysical neutrinos above PeV energies. The Demonstrator is a one-square meter class imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope deployed on Frisco Peak, Utah, and remotely operated. The light-collection surface is equipped with 77 mirror facets with 15 cm diameter, and its field of view is instrumented with a 256-pixel silicon-photomultiplier camera yielding a angular resolution. The camera signals are digitized with a 100 MS/s, and 12-bit resolution switched capacitor array readout. We discuss the Demonstrator’s design, the telescope’s deployment on Frisco Peak, and its commissioning. 

For the first time in the history of ground-based x-ray astronomy, the on-axis performance of the dual mirror, aspheric, aplanatic Schwarzschild-Couder optical system has been demonstrated in a 9:7-m aperture imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope. The novel design of the prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope (pSCT) is motivated by the need of the next-generation Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) observatory to have the ability to perform wide (>=8°) field-of-view observations simultaneously with superior imaging of atmospheric cascades (resolution of 0:067 per pixel or better). The pSCT design, if implemented in the CTA installation, has the potential to improve significantly both the x-ray angular resolution and the off-axis sensitivity of the observatory, reaching nearly the theoretical limit of the technique and thereby making a major impact on the CTA observatory sky survey programs, follow-up observations of multi-messenger transients with poorly known initial localization, as well as on the spatially resolved spectroscopic studies of extended x-ray sources. This contribution reports on the initial alignment procedures and point-spread-function results for the challenging segmented aspheric primary and secondary mirrors of the pSCT.