Scientists Develop Planetarium for the Blind

June 22 -- What does a star feel like?

Since nearly all astronomical knowledge is based on light — somethingthat is seen, not touched — that can seem an impossible question.

But for the more than 10 million visually impaired people in the UnitedStates, seeing stars and planets and other objects in the night skyisn't possible.

In recent years, however, a few devices — tactile maps,books and one small-scale planetarium — have emerged to help the blindgain a sense of their cosmic surroundings.

Hubble by Touch

The most recent and, some argue, most advanced guide yet will becomeavailable later this summer. The book, Touch the Universe: A NASABraille Book of Astronomy, features plastic, molded pages overlayingcolor photographs that allow reading fingers to feel the details ofplanets, nebulae and galaxies as seen by Hubble, NASA's 11-year-oldorbiting space telescope.

The 87-page book was the brainchild of Bernhard Beck-Winchatz, aNASA-funded astronomer at DePaul University in Chicago. Beck-Winchatzgot the idea while browsing a museum bookstore where he noticed Touchthe Stars, a 1990 tactile astronomy book based on hand-drawnillustrations by Connecticut astronomer Noreen Grice.

"I thought the book was good, but also sad since she had only usedhand-drawn sketches of the universe," he says. "Now there are so manyreal images available from Hubble."

After acquiring a NASA grant, Beck-Winchatz recruited Grice to work onconverting selected Hubble images for the blind. Using a series of metalcarving tools, Grice traced the images onto hard plastic and thenaluminum plates at her kitchen table. She then placed the metal platesin a heat vacuum machine to mold multiple copies of molded plasticpages.

Most challenging, she says, was making the complex, colorful images intosomething simple enough to understand by touch.

"Hubble captures so much detail that if I put it all in, it would betoo confusing," she says.

Codes for Colors, Matter