Touch the Invisible Sky!

NASA has succeeded in doing what nobody has tried before, by putting colored images of the skies at the fingertips of more than 10 million visually impaired people living on the territory of the United States. Some of the best images of the night sky ever taken have been made available for the blind into a 60-page book, by author Noreen Grice. Though they understand the nature of the universe and the world they live in as well as all of us, these people will never be able to see the beauty of the galaxies, stars, nebulae.

The book called "Touch the Invisible Sky" used pictures taken by multiple telescopes and embossed them into the pages, into three-dimensional images that render the shapes and colors of the respective objects. It also contains about 28 pages written in Braille, explaining the distinctive features of each image, in order to make a complete description and remove any false interpretations.

This new technology of creating images by embossing symbols enables the blind to gather information about the universe, much in the same way a normal person does, interpreting and understanding it. The book written by scientists from Grice of You Can Do Astronomy LLC and the Museum of Science, contains images taken with Chandra X-ray Space Telescope, Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescope, showing images of different areas of the sky, in multiple light spectrums, such as optical, radio, infrared and others.

Noreen Grice, the author of the book, uses for the first time the concept of light and spectrum in order to describe a series of cosmic objects, in increasing size order. The book explains simple concepts such as stars, supernovae, galaxies, and galactic collisions. As the book suggests, just because a person is able to see, it doesn't mean that he/she are able to observe every detail of the universe. For example, many of the images taken with the help of space telescopes, often require long exposure observations, or in light spectrums invisible with the naked eye, such as infrared and ultraviolet.