  For the first time in the history of ground-based $\gamma$-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 ($\geq 8^{\circ}$) field-of-view observations simultaneously
with superior imaging of atmospheric cascades (resolution of $0.067^{\circ}$
per pixel or better). The pSCT design, if implemented in the CTA installation,
has the potential to improve significantly both the $\gamma$-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 $\gamma$-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.
