Brooklyn Planet-Gazers Line Up Around Block For Glimpse Of Saturn

PARK SLOPE, NY — Brooklynites knew what to do when a telescope appeared in the middle of a Park Slope intersection Wednesday night: they waited their turn to gaze up at Saturn.

The line went around the block — and it lasted for over an hour.

The beautiful moment on Eighth Avenue and 9th Street — where "groovy, hippy kids" leaving an Alvvays concert in Prospect Park found the telescope — was captured on TikTok by Brooklynite Daphne Juliet Ellis.

"It's all love," Ellis said of the scene.

Without coordination, concert-goers lined up along 9th Street to wait their turn to look at Saturn, with help from a smiling Joe Delfausse, an amateur astronomer from Park Slope, who greeted them one-by-one.

Ellis told Patch the crowd understood collectively, "this is what we're doing now."

The line spilled over onto Eighth Avenue, so soon-to-be star gazers wrapped back around to stay on the quiet street, Ellis said.

Approaching cars stopped and waited or moved around the block — an intuitive but rare moment of collective traffic control.

Delfausse said the line lasted for an exceedingly unusual amount of time, although it's not unusual for dozens of interested passersby to line up behind his telescope.

He regularly views the moon and planets from 9th Street in Park Slope, where he has lived since 1976.

On Wednesday, he went out about 9 p.m. and nearly packed up because he was having so much trouble seeing Saturn — one of the few planets bright enough to see in the city's polluted sky.

"Around 10 o'clock, there it was," Delfausse told Patch.

And that's when what seemed like "millions of people" showed up, he said.

Delfausse is no stranger to sharing the joy of looking up.

A former long-term member of the Amateur Astronomers Association, Delfausse loves to share the joy of seeing a planet or the moon for the first time — something that is overwhelmingly beautiful, said Delfausse and Kat Troche, Vice President of Operations for the association.

"All of a sudden you see their face light up and you know they saw it," Delfausse said. "It is the most rewarding experience in the world."

"They were probably losing their minds," Troche said of the Brooklynites in line on Wednesday.

Members of the association set up their telescopes on public sidewalks multiple times a week throughout the city, Troche said.

The video of Delfausse's Park Slope set up perfectly captures the exhiliration of these regular New York City moments — except, of course, astronomers are discouraged from setting up in the middle of the road, she said.

The moment was perfectly Brooklyn, said the Williamsburg resident Ellis, especially in a community-focused neighborhood like Park Slope.

"Every street [in] Brooklyn has its own culture," she said. "There's something very vibrant about that area."

The scene has captured the attention of hundreds of thousands on social media who celebrated, among other things, the impact on traffic. Ellis was glad to see commenters use the "only in New York" phrase to describe a happy moment in her borough.

"This man who placed his telescope in the middle of a Brooklyn road to show strangers what Saturn looks like has done more for traffic calming than any elected official in the lower 48," one person said on Twitter. "Let’s protect this man at all costs."

Said another on TikTok, "This is how I wish the world was all the time."

Ellis was grateful for the reminder that the energy around us is within our collective control, if only we try.

"We've come together under the stars for this long," Ellis said. "We have the choice to do this kind of thing all the time."

Delfausse said he wasn't even aware the video had blown up until his son emailed him Thursday morning. He hopes all the attention will help interest people in astronomy.

"Millions of people could see what the people the other night saw," he said.

And the video is clearly offering viewers a reprieve from an otherwise downtrodden social media landscape, Ellis and Troche agreed.

"The world's a mess and it's nice to just stop and look up once in a while," Troche said.