Touch the Invisible Sky

It has been raining just every day this week and today was no exception. :-P The skies have been cloudy and scudding throughout and the nights cold and a little icy for any decent ob'ing. So the Bresser is still holing up in my room.

Meanwhile, an interesting question. How do you show to the blind the wonders and awesome greatness of space and the universe?

Here is one lady who did just that. It all began when Noreen was conducting a show in her planetarium and there were some blind children in the audience who couldn't (obviously) appreciate or enjoy the presentation due to that handicap. Later, she would create a book about astronomy for the blind. Called Touch the Universe, it had images from Hubble Space Telescope overlaid with vacuum-formed plastic sheets that created an actual 3D version of the image, so that blind people could feel what the object looked like. Now she has created her fifth book in the series, Touch the Invisible Sky. It has images from Hubble, the Spitzer (infrared) Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

What Noreen has done is nothing less than open the door on astronomy for an entire segment of the population that had been excluded. The look of the children's faces when they use the book and can actually feel the stripes on Jupiter says it all… it’s incredible!