It can’t be easy to hear again and again about all of the breathtaking pictures the Hubble Space Telescope has been taking over the years, when all you can do is hear about them. For the visually impaired, the cosmic artwork captured by the greatest telescope in human history is all hearsay—or at best something that can be seen only poorly, with nothing like the clarity and richness that is available to the fully sighted.
That’s about to change, thanks to Elena Sabbi, a lead researcher with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and SAS, a software analytics company in Cary, NC. Sabbi and SAS are releasing a six-chapter, 90-pg. eBook called Reach for the Stars, designed to provide a dazzling tutorial on the science of stars and astronomy in general, using Hubble images that are enhanced and presented in ways that makes the material accessible to the fully and partially sighted as well as to the blind.
The image above is the first one Reach for the Stars readers will encounter, and all by itself, it justifies the effort being put into the book. It’s a picture of the Tarantula Nebula, a 600 light year wide region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 170,000 light years from Earth, where 800,000 young stars are being born. Consider a place as improbable as that. Now imagine being able to experience it only through words. Fr a lot of people, that’s a limitation that will soon be no more.
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