Fantastic Tactile Universe session at My Sight Notts yesterday! Many thanks to Nic Bonne for facilitating. Tactile Universe aims to engage people with sight loss in astronomy. Did you know there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy and approximately 100 billion galaxies in the universe? Did you know that light from the sun takes 8.5 minutes to reach us but if we flew a plane there it would take 19 years? Nic showed us tactile models of a galaxy called M51 (see pictures below). Pictures show one side of the model as a high-definition black and white photo of M51 and the reverse side shows the tactile model of the same. The galaxy is apparently ‘eating’ a smaller one! Fascinating!
