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RedditNearly three years ago, astronomer Noreen Grice was spending all her weekends working—not gazing up at the stars, but hunched over her kitchen table in Connecticut carving circles, scoring squiggles and jabbing bumps into thin, record-album-size sheets of aluminum. Even so, she was focused on the universe: she was creating tactile “pictures” that would allow the blind—for the first time ever—to “see” photographs of planets, nebulae and galaxies. Says Grice, who presents planetarium shows at Boston’s Museum of Science: “I had very sore wrists.”
This past November, the aluminum sheets that Grice painstakingly fashioned became the basis for a book, Touch the Universe ( Joseph Henry Press, Washington, D.C.). It’s a collection of 14 pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, the 43.5-foot-long earth-orbiting satellite that since 1990 has beamed back images of planets, stars and galaxies, including the most distant views of the universe ever taken by an optical telescope. In Grice’s book, Hubble’s snapshots appear in full color for the sighted. And for the blind—thanks to Grice’s sore wrists—the contours of Saturn’s rings, the swirl of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, even the brilliant color of interstellar gas clouds are conveyed by ridges and bumps embossed on the images.
Astronomy, with its forever-out-of-reach subject matter, might seem the unlikeliest science to translate for touch. But for Grice, 40, who has the openness, earnestness and affability of a natural teacher, the only question was, why not? It started with a chance encounter that she had in 1984 during the summer before her senior year at BostonUniversity while working as an intern at the Museum of Science. Students from the nearby PerkinsSchool for the Blind were visiting, and Grice had helped them to their seats at the planetarium. After the show, she asked what they thought of it.
“That stunk!” said one.
Like most planetarium shows, it had been a visual journey through the night sky. There had been no explanation that might have helped those who couldn’t see it for themselves to know what it was all about. Grice thought, Why does it have to stink?
She decided to write a brochure that could be produced in Braille. “Then I said, ‘Wait a minute. That’s not what’s missing. The thing that’s missing is the pictures.’” A day or two later, she took the bus to the PerkinsSchool library. “I pulled the astronomy books down and I flipped through them, and there wasn’t one picture,” she says. Later, Grice learned that the only tactile illustrations available were made by an expensive, labor-intensive process of molding plastic over objects hand-glued onto cardboard.
Back at BostonUniversity, searching for a senior project, she walked into her professor’s office and said, “I’d like to write an astronomy book for the blind.” But though Grice completed the text for the book and earned her degree, she couldn’t come up with a way to produce the illustrations she envisioned.
In 1987, after earning her master’s in astronomy at San DiegoStateUniversity (where she met her husband, WesternConnecticutStateUniversity astronomer Dennis Dawson), she returned to work at the museum. But the problem of illustrating the book nagged at her. “I hadn’t finished it,” she says, “and I always complete projects.”
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