The men of Park Slope are on a mission to show New Yorkers heaven. And not even the city’s universal nightmare traffic can get in his way.
Joe Delfoss, 82, made headlines Tuesday as crowds gathered in the middle of Brooklyn’s Ninth Avenue to peer into his telescope for a glimpse of Saturn.
One driver yelled, “Get off this fucking road!” according to the gates of hellOther drivers took it with strides and drove slowly around the crosswalks and pedestrians that covered parts of the intersection.
As everyone bowed and stared into the lens, Delphos stood like a proud father.
“I can show them heaven.” he told the GuardianHe adds that his telescope has always piqued the interest of alert New Yorkers.
“Suddenly they let their guard down,” he says. “They are talking to people in front and behind them.
“I think we’re all hungry for connection. Seeing someone roll their eyes that they’ve never seen something like that makes me feel like I’ve made a difference. “
Delphos, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1976, doesn’t always get in the way of cars to look at space, and he didn’t set out there on Tuesday night.
The Long Island native was packing up and heading home when he couldn’t get a decent view of space from the sidewalk.
But then he found the perfect vantage point in the middle of the intersection of 8th and 9th Avenues.
As soon as he moved the telescope, a line started forming around him after an indie-pop concert held nearby ended, and the Cornell alumni excitedly invited them to glimpse the galaxy.
“He was just like a Zen Buddha in this space, guiding the hippie kids out of the concert,” said Daphne Juliette Ellis, 26, Who Filmed TikToktold the Guardian newspaper.
“I’m in my 80s and want to do something meaningful with my life,” Delphos, a former math and computer science teacher, told the magazine.
“I can’t think of anything more meaningful than watching a starry sky like this with people.”
He hadn’t always been interested in astronomy, but after striking up a conversation with a man in a photography shop in 1995, when the stranger invited him to attend a meeting of the New York Society of Amateur Astronomers, changed everything. his eyes.
Anyone can do it, said Delfous, who has been an astrophysicist for 20 years. “You don’t need a college degree to see Saturn or its rings.”
“When people look through a telescope, they are all the same,” he said.
