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Blind and Visually Impaired Community

Full History - 2021 - 05 - 21 - ID#ni8rm8
4
How do the fully blind envision the night sky/stars? (self.Blind)
submitted by Jbot_James
Just got done using my telescope, and while looking up at the sky I thought to myself, “the blind, although not able to see, must have their own “idea” for how everything looks, with some of those notions closer the reality than others”.

What I mean by this is that blind people obviously are able to distinguish what a table “looks” like pretty close to our native reality, but I know blind people have said that more abstract things (like a 3-dimensional cube/world on a 2-dimensional plane, such as a computer game) can be confusing.

With this said, how do you all imagine the night sky to look? Really looking forward to the insight!
retrolental_morose 3 points 2y ago
All I can see – and have ever seen – is light. So I just envisage them as an extension of that; illuminated dots in the sky. There is a subtle, but inexplicable, difference in my perception of generated rather than reflected light, i.e. looking up at the sun directly versus down at snow on the ground. But although I know intellectually it is light from stars reflecting from other celestial objects that causes us to see light, I have no idea what that means in practice. I almost certainly lack enough perceptivity to see any differences in objects in the sky, and of course can’t control my eyes or focus images in any way anyhow, so any sort of telescopic aid to my vision would almost certainly be a less than inspiring experience.
Jbot_James [OP] 1 points 2y ago
Thanks for the insight, I really appreciate it a lot!
oncenightvaler 1 points 2y ago
ok here goes nothing.

Night sky: It's like a large canvas, sometimes theres clouds, clouds sometimes look like cotton but are made out of water.

There's the moon, depending on the position of the earth one can see more of the moon, but fun fact what we call a full moon is really only half of the moon's surface, because there's the darker side of the moon.

Stars: stars are large spheres of gas, that's very hard to picture. I used to think stars looked like the geometric shape so they had five points but then I found out I was wrong. Stars make up constellations, meaning that it's kinda like connect the dots between a bunch of stars and you see a picture, (know connect the dots because I once found a Braille colouring book) . I don't know many of the constellations, but I like hearing about those.

A lot of stars (but probably not all) have planets orbiting around them. I picture this like have you ever seen those Ferris Wheel rides at the fairs, where there's all cars turning on the wheel.

Our eight (or nine) planets make up one solar system. Several solar systems make up Milky Way galaxy. Universe is filled with many galaxies. this is called macrocosm.

We are all made of cells. Cells have tiny parts which are made of molecules. Molecules are made of atoms. Atoms are made of protons, neutrons, electrons.

That is called themicrocosm. The universe in all its scope blows my mind. "Thanks for coming to my TED talk." but seriously look up an essay "on the sublime" by Isaac Asimov. he talks about his view that science has its own kind of beauty and I learned more science perspective from that one essay than I learned in two semesters of science in high school.
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