Astronomy is a very visual activity. It’s difficult to describe what the night sky, a galaxy, or a constellation looks like, without referring to things such as colour, brightness and shape. These terms are very visual – how then would describe what these things look like to people who are visually impaired?

Faulkes Telescope team member Mat Allen has been running a project for the last few months to answer that very question. Inspired by other great visual impairment science projects, Mat has been creating resources to help people feel and hear what the Universe looks like. It’s all part of an award that Mat won in the summer of 2018, called the Josh Award, which saw him present his visual impairment astronomy project at the Manchester Science Festival in October 2018.

How can you feel the Universe? Well, the emergence of 3D printing has enabled us to 3D print objects, including images of galaxies. We take a square of plastic, then raise the parts which represent the bright parts of the galaxies, and keep the darker parts of the image as being flat. This means you can easily feel where the light in the galaxy is. Mat has also 3D printed some areas of the surface of Mars and the Moon, so you can feel the craters and volcanoes on the surfaces of these bodies. Mat has also made a game, where people have to investigate mysterious objects in obscured boxes, to work out whether the objects are meteorites or meteor-wrongs!

There are some other great projects across the UK, which are working with visually impaired audiences, such as Tactile Universe and Tactile Collider. If you’d like any more information about Mat’s resources or work, you can get in touch using our Contact Form.