Astronomer Noreen Grice | Meeting the Minds

She was determined to let the blind touch the stars

By Billy Baker

Globe Correspondent / September 22, 2008

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When she was an undergraduate astronomy major at Boston University in the mid-1980s, Noreen Grice got a work-study job taking tickets at the Hayden Planetarium in the Museum of Science. For a space geek who had grown up learning about the stars by looking up at that same dome, this was something of a dream job, a chance to see, night after night, what the city lights wouldn't allow - the breathtaking visual beauty of the astronomical canvas.

A month into her job, as she was welcoming people to the theater one day, Grice was surprised to notice a group of blind people in the line. Astronomy is about seeing, and Grice worried they wouldn't get much from the show.

She was right. When she asked them what they thought of it, they told her they were disappointed.

This bothered Grice, who, having been raised by her mother and grandmother in the projects in Malden, understood what it was like to feel left out. "All the other kids at school had fathers," she said recently, standing under the planetarium dome, where she still works. "I knew what it was like to be stigmatized."

Grice left the theater that day with a curious mission: She was going help those who couldn't see the stars find a way to touch them.

"That's how I got interested in astronomy. I would watch Star Trek and I really identified with Mr. Spock," she said of the character played by Leonard Nimoy (who narrates the introduction to the films at the museum's Mugar Omni Theater, just across the hall).

Grice had seen buses going down Commonwealth Avenue that had Watertown listed as a destination, and she had heard there was a school for the blind in Watertown, so she found her way to the Perkins School for the Blind. At the school library, she located a couple of Carl Sagan books transcribed into Braille, but they were missing the most important feature - pictures. A librarian informed her this was because raised pictures were very expensive to produce.

Kenneth Janes, an astronomy professor at BU who was Grice's advisor, remembers the day she walked into his office and announced her plans to create an astronomy book for the blind. "My initial reaction was, 'How can you get a blind person to appreciate something one thinks of as only a visual science, perhaps the most visual of all sciences?' " Janes recalled. "I didn't say it was impossible, but. . . she was determined. She's always been very determined."

Grice created a rough draft of the book - it was a technical challenge to figure out how to create tactile images, which she did at first by literally carving the planets and constellations into plastic sheets by hand - and then left for a master's degree in San Diego.

Janes figured the idea would simply end up as one of those class projects that goes nowhere. But when Grice returned to Boston - and a job as one of the "voices in the dark" at the planetarium - she picked up where she left off and published the book with the title, "Touch the Stars." It sold out, and the idea has snowballed.

"Touch the Stars" is now in its fourth edition, and Grice has continually refined the image process. Her blind clients have taught her that less is often more - so that the printed images rise off the page at different heights and textures to convey more nuance.

At the request of other astronomers and even NASA, she's published similar books on the moon, the sun, and the images from the Hubble Space Telescope. She's helped make the planetarium shows more pictorially descriptive, and visually-impaired visitors not only get tactile pictures that allow them to follow along, but get to take them home for free (a great source of pride for her).

Earlier this year, she released her latest book, which is significant because it's a leveler of sorts. It's called "Touch the Invisible Sky," and it deals with those things in the galaxy that can't be seen by the human eye.

Grices' work has not gone without appreciation. She's one of the few sighted members of the National Federation of the Blind, and gets emotional when she recounts the response from those she's helped to see what their eyes won't allow.

"I'll go to conferences and kids will come up to me and say 'You got me interested in astronomy and now I want to be the first blind astronomer on Mars,' " she said.

"I feel really humbled when the kids ask me to sign their book, even thought they're not going to see what I wrote. It's important to them, and it's important to me."