A new book brings cosmic objects close enough to touch — at least
for the fingers of the blind.
NASA this week debuted a new book that presents images from its
Great Observatories in a new format that allows visually impaired people to experience
them.
"About 10 million visually impaired people live in the United States," said author Noreen Grice, in a statement. "I hope this book will be a unique resource for people who are sighted or blind to better understand the part of the universe that is invisible to all of us."
"Touch the Invisible Sky" contains 60
pages of color images of nebulae,
stars, galaxies and a few of the telescopes used to capture the pictures. The
authors added embossing of lines, bumps and other textures to each image,
rendering colors, shapes, and other details in a third dimension. Descriptions
that accompany each of the 28 images in the book are supplied in Braille and
large-print text, making the information accessible to readers having differing
visual abilities.
Images included come from the Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra
X-ray Observatory, Spitzer Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes. The
celestial subjects are shown as they appear through visible-light telescopes
and different spectral regions including radio, infrared, visible, ultraviolet
and X-ray light.
The book introduces the concept of light and the spectrum. A variety
of objects are presented to illustrate these concepts in order of increasing
distance, beginning with our sun, then traveling out into the galaxy to
exploding and dying stars, the Whirlpool galaxy
and colliding Antennae galaxies.
As suggested by the book's title, many of the things outside the
visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum are "invisible" to sighted
persons. Even celestial wonders photographed by Hubble and ground-based
telescopes using visible light can only be captured through very long
exposures. Then the researchers manipulate the images further, adding color and
enhancing details. The information in "Touch the Invisible Sky" may allow
blind and visually impaired students to interpret information about
the universe as well as sighted persons.
"Touch the Invisible Sky" was written by Noreen Grice of
You Can Do Astronomy LLC and the Museum of Science, Boston, with Simon Steel,
an astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in
Cambridge, Mass., and Doris Daou, an astronomer at NASA Headquarters,
Washington.
The book will be available through NASA libraries, the National
Federation of the Blind, Library of Congress repositories, schools for the
blind, libraries, museums, science centers and Ozone Publishing.
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