This is a cool idea: a space book for the visually impaired and blind. Using a combination of braille, embossing and textured images, this amazing new book is aiming to bring space and its beauty to a new slice of the demographic pie.
(This is good timing for the internet, what with the recent YouTube videos of the sounds of Jupiter and Saturn.)
The book also points out that a lot of what we see in images from space is already beyond the human eye’s perception.
By showing these images, we remind readers that most of the universe and its beauty is hidden for all of our eyes unless we use special telescopes – Doris Daou, Co-author
The book contains images of stars, planets, nebulae and some telescopes too. I think this is wonderful and would be very interested to hear what a blind person might have to say about ‘images’ of space. and whether any new insights can be gleaned from them.
If you know any blind astronomers, or are blind yourself, please let me know what I can do to make this sight more easily accessible to the visually impaired.
“Touch the Invisible Sky” was written by astronomy educator and accessibility specialist Noreen Grice of You Can Do Astronomy LLC and the Museum of Science, Boston, with authors Simon Steel, an astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and Doris Daou, an astronomer at NASA Headquarters, Washington.
For more information, visit the NASA site.
[Via the Bad Astronomer]
Orbiting Frog 
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