Stars are the passion of Peter Lord’s life, a fascination he said he shares with the human race throughout history.

“Look at primitive cultures throughout the world,” Lord said. “There is this sense of wanting to be connected with what’s out there.”

Since moving with his wife to Bernard on Mount Desert Island three years ago, Lord has been on a mission to spread the wonder of astronomy on MDI and beyond.

It’s been an abrupt career change for a late-in-life amateur astronomer. In the 1990s, Lord was content merely to work with machinery that would go out into the stars, designing satellite equipment in California.

His shift to astronomy resulted from a chance visit to a telescope store one day. For whatever reason, the store sparked something innate in Lord’s imagination.

“It just let off a firestorm of buying new equipment,” he said.

For the next few years, he tinkered with building his own telescopes and met with other amateur astronomers. But then he went back to school for a master’s degree at Stanford in liberal arts, not astronomy.

He put his budding astronomy interest on hold until he took a class on Dante’s Inferno. Lord discovered the classic poem was rife with detailed references to astronomy, and wrote his master’s thesis on the subject. He argued that astronomy was more than a number-crunching science; it was part of the human condition.

“This decision to look up and understand what we see…is at the main core of the liberal arts tradition,” Lord said.

Lord discovered his calling was to connect people with the forgotten passion of astronomy.

“The art of astronomy, not the science, didn’t have a voice,” he said.

But he wasn’t to do it in California. Lord said something tugged at him to return to MDI, where he spent childhood summers.

“This place continued to haunt me,” he said.

A move to the island was planned as a dream down the road, but during a family reunion in Maine, Lord and his wife decided to take the plunge and buy a shell of a cottage in Bernard.

At first, they pursued his astronomy interests as a commercial venture, and opened up a small store on a lobster pier in Bass Harbor. Around the same time, they built a guest cottage and observatory to rent out for vacationing stargazers. Because they had to book guests in advance, the rough construction of the observatory was barely complete before the first guests arrived.

“My poor first guests, they were wonderful,” he laughed.

The guest cottage has been “astronomically” successful, as stargazers have flocked to MDI to see the clear night sky they can’t see in cities or suburbs. It’s helped that most guests have the added bonus of Lord as their personal tour guide to the universe.

But the astronomy store was not faring as well, and the rent was becoming more than the couple could afford.

At the same time, Lord was receiving an ever-increasing number of calls from local public school officials. Principals wanted his guidance in building astronomy curriculum, and teachers asked him to be a guest lecturer.

At first, Lord was reluctant to go into the classroom.

“The first public talk I had to give terrified me,” he said.

But his wife convinced him to try it, and Lord was soon a regular presence in many of the island’s public schools. He’s glad he listened to her because he’s enjoyed working with children.

“I literally get to watch their eyes light up,” he said. “That’s cool!”

Lord then stumbled upon a NASA grant program intended to ensure a quality supply of future engineers. The grant paid people like Lord to do exactly what he was doing. He applied and received a $10,000 grant, but because of a matching-funds component, he donated his classroom time.

“We were getting paid for half the work rather than getting paid for none of it,” he joked.

Lord also won a grant to teach a course called the Philosophy of Astronomy at the College of the Atlantic.

“In one year, I had gone from never being in front of the classroom to being all over the place,” he said.

Lord, along with a handful of other MDI astronomy aficionados, decided to form a non-profit organization called the Island Astronomy Institute. The Institute’s twofold mission is to help people embrace astronomy and preserve MDI’s dark sky from the threats of light pollution.