A new project by NASA will allow the blind to touch the stars.
The space agency has unveiled its new book "Touch the Invisible Sky" which gives blind readers the chance to experience celestial bodies as seen through space-based observatories and telescopes.
The authors used a combination of braille, traditional text, and textures such as lines, bumps and symbols to represent different physical features such as colour and shape, and introduce the concept of light and the spectrum, states a release from NASA.
"Readers take a cosmic journey beginning with images of the sun, and travel out into the galaxy to visit relics of exploding and dying stars, as well as the Whirlpool galaxy and colliding Antennae galaxies," NASA says.
One of the authors of the book told CTV's Canada AM the book offers a unique "view" of the heavens.
"Since the sun is a star we went to the next step, into images that will give us examples of how stars are born and how they die," said NASA's Doris Daou.
"Because our sun is part of our galaxy we wanted to show images of galaxies, and we have a couple of them, one of them is known as the antenna galaxy because it is showing the interaction of two galaxies when they merge together."
One of the challenges, she said, was to present vast amounts of information without overwhelming the reader.
The authors worked with a group of 100 students at the Colorado School for the Blind to work out the bugs, and spent a year and a half putting the project together.
"Sometimes when you go from the normal image to the tactile, less is more," Daou said. "If you give too much information you might just confuse the people who are trying to understand the examples they are touching, so it was a long process."
The book is intended for both blind and sighted readers, and presents celestial objects "as they appear through visible-light telescopes and in different spectral regions that are invisible to the naked eye," Daou said.
She said the response, both among blind readers and those who can see, has been positive.
"Kids of all ages really loved the book because the beauty is not only that it's tactile but it shows also, for people who can see, the difference of information that is provided from one wavelength to another, so in a sense everyone can get informative learning information from this book," Daou said.
