As darkness fell one recent summer night, Rick Costello set up his telescope in front of the library in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He took a sign from his car and hung it on a nearby post. It read, “Come see the universe.”
The first to take a look was a young girl walking by. Within minutes, a crowd had formed.
The crowd would remain all night, with some staying for five minutes, and others for hours.
Tourists come to downtown Great Barrington for a quiet night with their families. Most don’t expect a chance to gaze into the galaxy.
“You can’t go your whole life without ever seeing Saturn through a telescope,” Costello said to a group of viewers.
“Saturn? We’re going to see Saturn?!” one exclaimed.
Locals are less surprised. For some, Costello is a feature of Main Street.
Debby Greene, who lives around the corner, has grown accustomed to the town's Starman, as he's called.
"Seeing Saturn and the rings in a different position than they were two or three weeks ago was cool," Greene said.
Costello has been coming to this spot outside the Mason Library for four years -- when the weather is nice. He said it's just him and the telescope, no affiliation with the library.
“So you just come out when you feel like it, on a good night?” asked one viewer.
“Yeah, when I need to be around people, I come out,” Costello said, and they both laughed.
Costello juggled many questions at the same time. As he answered one from Andrew Thielemann, an enthusiastic passerby from Canaan, Connecticut, he pulled the group into a broader observation.
“How many million miles [away] is Saturn?” Thielemann asked.
“Ohh, about 800 million miles,” Costello answered, and then turned to the rest of the group. “But being three feet away from you, you’re seeing me three-billionths of a second ago. In a billionth of a second, light travels about one foot. So you never see anything as it happens, the second it happens. Light always has to travel to you. When we look at galaxies, then we’re looking millions of miles into the past, as it’s taking that light millions of miles to reach us. Telescopes are kind of time machines.”
At one point, a woman visiting from Bethesda, Maryland, asked a question on everyone's mind.
“Wait -- what do you do? How do you know all of this?” she asked.
“I’ve been studying it my whole life, since I was a kid,” Costello said. ”When we landed on the moon, I looked up, and I said, ‘I have to understand this.’ It’s an obsession, maybe, but it’s a good one to have.”
Costello is completely self-taught. Since 1969, he's been reading anything relevant he can get his hands on.
When the crowd began to disappear, he talked about a night the weekend before, when more than 100 people had stopped by.
“And the great thing is that almost every one of those people was looking through a telescope for the first time,” he said. “And that’s kind of why I do it. I think it’s sad people go through their whole lives without looking and seeing Saturn, Jupiter or even the moon.”
What struck me most about this spontaneous gathering was watching unlikely interactions. I'm a Great Barrington resident myself, and I know that in this part of Massachusetts, there's tension between locals and tourists.
Costello's telescope pulls in both groups.
As the night was winding down, Great Barrington resident Tom Truss joked with Thielemann and others.
“I think I see water!” one viewer joked.
“You see water!” Truss laughed.
“I thought I saw some green cheese,” said Thielemann.
“Definitely not Swiss,” added another.
During the few hours Costello stood with his telescope, it seemed like every single person who walked by stopped to take a look.
As Costello put it: Set the telescope up, they will come.
