The Dark Side (of Acadia) Island Astronomy Institute on Mount Desert Island a great place to view the vast universe

Inside the cozy cabinlike building on the wharf, we seem to have stepped into a garden of telescopes. Barrel-like telescopes as tall as a child sitting on the floor, and small tubelike ones are poised on tables. Slender refracting scopes and wide-aperture reflectors. Binoculars, filters, eyepieces and lenses line shelves up and down the warmly lit pine walls. Among the optical equipment are red-beam flashlights, planispheres, three-dimensional models of the solar system, maps of the stars. For anyone interested in the night sky, this is heaven.

We’re at the Island Astronomy Institute on Mount Desert Island, but my 13-year-old son, Jack, and I feel we may have stepped from dark woods into an entryway to the universe.

In a way, we have.

Peter Lord, the owner and director of the Bernard-based institute, greets us with warm enthusiasm and invites us to have a seat among semicircles of chairs in the adjoining room, where lectures and presentations on the contents, motion and immensity of outer space are routinely given.

Lord fires up his laptop computer to generate PowerPoint slides and explains that astronomy is a lot more than just the recording of facts and figures. The work of professional astronomers is important, he says, but its mathematical intricacies are beyond the reach of the everyday person whose experience of the night sky has more to do with awe, and deeper feelings, inspired by the stars. Astronomy, Lord suggests to us, is not only the equations but also the feelings we get when starlight strikes the eye.

The purpose of the Island Astronomy Institute is to help focus those feelings, to blend the facts of science with everyday experience and bring astronomy back within everyone’s reach. To this end, the institute, run by Lord and his wife, Linda, not only gives educational presentations and workshops in astronomy and the art of stargazing, but also aims to be a resource for local schools and educators.

Lord teamed up last year with teachers at the Pemetic School in Southwest Harbor to create a professional development program called the Pemetic Astronomy Initiative, which is a forum for the development of space science curricula and in-class support. The institute also took a giant step toward fulfilling its mission in September when the Maine Space Grant Consortium, NASA’s affiliate in Maine, extended nonprofit status to Lord’s operation.

One of the institute’s most down-to-Earth undertakings is to promote and protect Acadia National Park and Mount Desert Island as a “dark sky preserve.”

“We’re on what I call ‘the dark side’ of the island,” Lord tells us. He explains, using startling satellite pictures showing large swatches of light thrown into space from North America, that Down East Maine has some of the darkest skies in the United States, and that MDI’s night sky was recently designated a national resource by the National Park Service.

“In the average city,” Lord says, “only about a dozen stars are visible on a clear night because the city’s lights wash out the sky.” All that light going up unused into the sky is called “light pollution.”

“But in Maine’s darkest skies,” he says, “about 6,000 to 8,000 stars can be seen on a clear night.” He chose to locate his astronomy institute in Bernard in part because it’s farthest from the light pollution of the mainland.

Lord stresses “the win-win idea of good lighting practices” in, for example, parking lots and city streets by comparing a streetlight to a living room lamp. “You always put a shade over your lamp to cut the glare and make your home more pleasant,” he says. “So why not do the same outside – send the light down toward the ground” where it’s needed, instead of letting it flood unused into the sky, where it washes out the stars and interferes with the work of telescopes.

Telescopes are clearly one of Lord’s great passions. His next slideshow presentation, “Powers of Ten,” takes us step by step from an Italian rose bush outward by exponents of ten into deep space and beyond, to the extremes of the known universe – in other words, to the most distant galaxies glimpsed by the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s a long way off, and there are a lot of stars – the average galaxy may have 100 billion stars, and astronomers have estimated that around 120 billion galaxies may exist. Yikes.

“But,” Lord says, “the strange thing is that, while there are all those galaxies and stars out there that we know about, in fact 96 percent of what’s in the universe is unknown to us. We officially don’t know what the universe is made out of.”

This fact bends the minds of Jack, me and Sam Burne, 17, of Town Hill who has joined us as Lord’s unofficial assistant. “What about atoms?” Sam says. “In my chemistry class we learned that an atom is a tiny solar system.”

But it turns out this isn’t exactly the case. The model used to explain how atoms behave is a metaphor invented to give visible shape to the findings of mathematical equations. Electrons don’t really circle around nucleuses like planets around suns – we just say they do as a way of understanding activity that otherwise is lost on head-scratching Earthlings like us.

At this point, Lord launches into an impassioned explanation of the importance of metaphor – which is code for the importance of poetry – in understanding anything, particularly science which is so highly specialized that even scientists sometimes have trouble knowing what each other are talking about. Lord’s true mission, it’s clear, is to reunite the worlds of astronomy and poetry.

His own life is an example. Peter Lord, 42, grew up in Connecticut and got his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Syracuse University. He became a design engineer for satellite technology, and was one of the early developers of the concept of what became today’s satellite TV dish. In California, he spent nearly a decade helping aerospace contractors create satellite systems, and along the way he got caught in the web of the night sky.

The feelings he experienced as an amateur stargazer spurred him to seek out other people’s expressions of the same experience, and he was led to the poetry of the great 14th century Italian poet Dante Alighieri. Dante’s masterpiece, “The Divine Comedy,” synthesized the astronomy of his time with deep religious sensibilities. Lord wrote a thesis on “Dante’s Guiding Light: The Astronomy of the Divine Comedy” for a master’s degree in liberal studies at Stanford University, departed his engineering job and last year moved with his wife to Bernard to open the Island Astronomy Institute.

In its first full year, the institute has successfully begun its synthesis of science and awe. A couple of miles from the building on the wharf, Lord built a small observatory and equipped it with a custom-made refracting telescope, which draws deep space down to MDI. Visitors are invited to spend a week or two at an adjacent cabin, look through the telescope on clear nights, and listen to lectures on astronomy and its meaning in human life. Even in this somewhat slack tourist year, the cabin was booked every week of the summer.

After the presentations, Lord escorts Jack, Sam and me to the observatory, but scudding ridges of mackerel clouds blank out all but a few fleeting glimpses of the near-full moon. After some instruction in various kinds of telescopes – Newtonian, Schmidt-Cassegrain, Dobsonian – Jack and I take our leave and drive back to our home in the woods of central Maine, navigating a night expanded for us by powers of ten.

The Island Astronomy Institute’s activities are in full swing from April through October, with free presentations on Friday evenings and winter lectures planned for local libraries. Reservations for workshops and presentations can be made by calling 244-9477, and more information about the institute and educational programs is available on the institute’s Web site at www.islandastro.com.