>> For whatever reason it feels great to touch it.
>> I don't know how it really looks, but it feels like
>> 'oh this is what I thought a nebula would be like.'
>> I was born with Congenital cataracts, so what that
>> means is I had an opaque film over both of my eyes
>> when I was born. What that resulted in is very blurry
>> vision, blurry images, I don't have any sense of detail.
>> As a blind child, there weren't a lot of accessible materials
>> readily available to me as a youngster who was already
>> interested in science. It was something that we would take
>> styrofoam balls or cups and kind of make the planets,
>> a very rudimentary concept of what the planets look like.
>> But when it came to looking at an image from a textbook,
>> that was something that I didn't have access to.
>> All of these were words and concepts I couldn't physically
>> grasp on my own, to experience it for myself.
>> As a blind student, I'm wondering, 'can I get just as
>> excited as everyone else?'
>> This book is entitled 'Touch the Universe' a NASA Braille book of astronomy.
>> by Noreen Grice.
>> Which took Hubble, and the images that came from Hubble,
>> and created a source of really powerful information of
>> what a telescope looks like? What does a nebula look like?
>> What do, even our stars, what do they look like?
>> But with the book it actually came to life.
>> It created a sense, an actual understanding of what these
>> science concepts that you're learning in school? You can
>> actually learn this from a book as well.
>> One of the images that was captured with Hubble is Jupiter.
>> So on this page we have the outline of the planet itself,
>> we also have the gas rings that are at various points of
>> the planet itself. But we also have the Great Red Spot.
>> And so with touch I can actually tell it's not a horizontal
>> view, it's actually at an angle. So again, through these images
>> from Hubble I get a better understanding of what my classmates,
>> what my friends are looking at when they go to museums and
>> it does allow me to question and say 'well why does this
>> planet tilt in the way that it does?
>> There is a star within the center of it. And almost
>> just like a number eight it's expanded out from its hemisphere,
>> again, as a young kid, and you hear the word 'nebula'
>> it's kind of equated to 'nebulous' and you think oh there's
>> chaos, it's just a bunch of stars. But to see through this image
>> that a nebula can have a certain order to it, a beautiful order
>> to it, then this hourglass nebula shows that indeed is what it looks like.
>> Almost like our Milky Way, it actually spirals out with almost
>> three? Almost three legs that spiral out and it's almost like
>> you wanna grab it and you almost spin it.
>> And that's actually what the galaxy is doing, is spinning.
>> So it's kinda cool. It either feels almost like a
>> spider, with legs, but you know that it's a galaxy in space.
>> I felt like I was back in fifth or sixth grade and reliving that experience
>> of the launch of Hubble and actually getting a chance to say
>> 'hey, now I have this access, now I can experience this excitement for myself.
>> It kind of made me feel like a kid again to be able to say
>> 'Oh this is what a star looks like, or this is what a telescope looks like,
>> or this is what our planets look like.
>> Because for such a long time I didn't know.
[MUSIC]