A new book that transforms full-color photos from the Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer space telescopes into tactile illustrations will allow the blind to touch the stars, planets and other astronomical objects captured by the lenses of orbital observatories. The book, entitled Touch the Invisible Sky , combines the images captured by the telescope with plastic layers that form a kind of relief, thus allowing the blind to "read" them with their fingers.
In its pages, the work collects a careful selection of photographs in different wavelengths (ultraviolet, gamma rays, infrared, …) that are naturally invisible to the human eye . According to Tim Hendel, one of the first blind people who has had access to the book, in its pages "it is shown that, in a certain way, all humans are partially blind: no one can see gamma rays without the help of a telescope."
The authors of Touch the Invisible Sky , the astronomer Berhard Beck-Winchatz and the scientist and writer Noreen Grice, hope that it will be used in science classes for the blind , and will serve its goal of giving such students an idea of the universe. "It's the only way to touch something so distant," Grice declared.
