Invisible Choirs Arise Around Us

"Imagine that you could only hear sound from the middle three keys on a piano and were asked to name a song.... Being able to study a star, nebula, or galaxy across the entire electromagnetic spectrum gives us the big picture, providing clues to unravel the greatest mysteries ...."

When we look at the universe with our fleshy eyes, we are all mostly blind. Humans can only see a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum as light. The images from radio telescopes and other star-gazing devices are falsely colored to allow us to appreciate these as imagery. But what about people who cannot see in the visible spectrum at all?

In a new book, Touch the Invisible Sky, the wide swaths of the invisible electromagnetic spectrum are laid out before the reader as tactile images. The book was designed by an incredible educator named Noreen Grice, who has been bringing the wonders of astronomy to the blind for years. At the Bad Astronomy blog, Phil Plait has posted a video about Noreen and her work.