Metro
A Park Slope man is on a mission to show New Yorkers the heavens — and not even the city’s universally nightmarish traffic can get in his way. Joe Delfausse, 82, went viral on Tuesday after a large group of people gathered in the middle of Ninth Avenue in Brooklyn to peer into his telescope to catch a glimpse of Saturn.
Though one driver yelled, “Get out of the f–king road,” according to Hell Gate, other motorists took it in stride and slowly maneuvered around the stargazers.
Delfausse stood like a proud dad as each person dipped their head to gaze into the lens.
“I can show them the heavens,” he told the Guardian, adding that his telescope always piques the interest of often-wary New Yorkers.
“All of a sudden, they drop their guard,” he said. “They’re talking to the people in front and behind them.
“I guess we’re all starved for connection, and when you see someone’s eyes widen because they’ve never seen anything like that, you feel like you’ve made a difference.”
Delfausse, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1976, doesn’t always interrupt traffic to view the universe, nor did he start there on Tuesday evening. When the Long Island native couldn’t get a decent view of the cosmos from the sidewalk, he was about to pack up and head home.
But then he saw the perfect vantage point — in the middle of the intersection of Eighth Avenue and Ninth Street. Soon after he moved his telescope, a line began to form around him after a nearby indie pop concert ended, and the Cornell alum excitedly offered them a glimpse of the galaxy.
“He was really this kind of Zen Buddha in the space, shepherding a bunch of hippie kids who just got out of a concert,” Daphne Juliet Ellis, 26, who filmed the TikTok, told The Guardian.
“I’m in my 80s, and you want to do something meaningful in your life,” Delfausse, a former math and computer science teacher, told the outlet.
“I can’t think of anything that’s more meaningful than this kind of stargazing with people.”
He wasn’t always interested in astronomy, but after striking up a conversation with a man at a photo shop in 1995, that all changed when the stranger invited him to attend an Amateur Astronomers Association of New York meeting, and he instantly had stars in his eyes.
Delfausse, who has been stargazing for 20 years, said anyone can do it, and they “don’t need a college degree or anything to see Saturn and those rings.”
“When people look through a telescope, they’re all the same,” he said.