With the early morning sky still dark, the mood was unnervingly chipper inside the Indian Road Café and Market at 6:30 a.m. on a recent Friday, where some 15 people sipped coffee and chatted as if it were a carefree weekend afternoon.

Members of the Inwood Astronomy Project had roused themselves on October 9 to do what stargazers from Mumbai to Hawaii were doing: watching a live telecast of a spacecraft slamming into the moon, in search of water. An additional 30 people arrived for the 7:31 a.m. impact, squeezing into corners with their croissants and jockeying for a clear view of the television screen. Richard Herrera, a club member and graphics designer who had stayed up all night, called it “a geeky kind of excitement.”

“It’s cool to bring others in who would not be so into it,” he said.

What actually appeared on screen proved to be an anticlimactic sequence of pictures of the lunar surface, followed by control room images of NASA engineers applauding. The mission went according to plan, NASA said, even though the anticipated dust plume upon impact did not occur.

But in Inwood, almost 250,000 miles from the moon, the large turnout meant the group had come one step closer to accomplishing its own mission. For the past year and a half, the group has held weekly stargazing sessions and special events at Inwood Hill Park — helping uptown residents find a common bond by looking at the sky. This month’s events, dubbed “The Galilean Nights Festival,” will include a play reading and concert.

Weather permitting, Wednesday evening outings on the park’s baseball fields can draw 20 to 50 people. Saturday evenings at the top of the park’s western ridge have attracted up to 60. The mood is upbeat as members and passersby study the sky with the few telescopes members bring. “You goof around,” said Connie Vasquez, 49, an attorney who joined 10 months ago. “You make friends fast.”

Lori Sommer, a 39-year-old stand-up, is a regular. “I look forward to a clear Wednesday and Saturday night and if not, I’m upset,” Sommer said.

Leading this band of amateur astronomers is Jason Kendall, a 41-year-old whirlwind who lugs 80 pounds of gear (plus potato chips) just under a mile to the park and back to his Isham Street home. Kendall, a computer administrator at a financial services company, is committed to astronomy; in the days after the mission Kendall – also a NASA-designated community liaison – spoke about space at the local library, SUNY Buffalo and the American Museum of Natural History, where he volunteers.

Local vendors like Starbucks, C-Town and Grandpa’s Brick Oven Pizza sometimes supply food, but by and large Kendall and his wife, Donna Stearns, cover the costs of the group. They’ve spent about $10,000 on equipment, trips and supplies; the young organization receives no public money. Kendall also serves as chief ringleader, teacher and comedian. For instance, with the projectile spacecraft aimed at the moon’s unlighted south pole, he said, “They are literally going to where the sun don’t shine” – prompting guffaws around the café.

Kendall received one master’s degree in astronomy from New Mexico State University and another in theater from the University of Texas at Austin. He laughs often but is quick to point out the organization’s greater significance.

Kendall first fell in love with astronomy as an elementary school student in Springfield, Ill. The area had little light pollution and he remembered riding his bike under a moonless sky, lit by the stars. Kendall’s father, dean of the graduate school at what’s now the University of Illinois at Springfield and helped bring the astronomer Bart Bok, known for his study of the Milky Way, to campus. The fourth-grade Kendall interviewed him for a class project and was taken by the man’s admonitions to visit him at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. “From then on, it was kind of it,” Kendall said, who made it to the observatory in 1988.

Now Kendall operates his own makeshift outdoor observatory and treasures the way it brings together groups that wouldn’t interact otherwise. Dominican-born passersby, for instance, are some of the most knowledgeable local stargazers because their homeland has less light pollution, he said.

He was once watching the stars alone when three burly, tattooed men approached and asked what he was doing. Soon after, a young well-to-do woman walking an Afghan hound stopped and asked the same question. A homeless man came from the woods to see what was happening. The motley crew, looking through Kendall’s telescope, got along well. “It was an impossibility under any other circumstance,” he recalled.

The group aims to spark an interest in science because astronomy, Kendall said, is “a gateway science.” He listens for the right type of “wow,” he said. One version sounds short, flat and dull but the other is drawn-out and breathy. “When you hear that second one, that’s when you know there’s a memory,” Kendall said. He estimated that he had heard that version at least a few hundred times since he first started schlepping his telescope to Inwood Hill Park.