How Blind Astronomers Will Observe the Solar Eclipse

August 21, 2017 10:29 AM

Like millions of other people, Wanda Diaz Merced plans to observe the August 21 total solar eclipse...But she won’t see it. She’ll hear it. Diaz Merced is an astrophysicist who also happens to be blind. While searching for ways to study stellar radiation without relying on sight, she has developed a way to represent complex data about our universe as sound (transcript).

TED Radio Hour: How can we hear the stars? (includes transcript).

Wanda Díaz-Merced: Making Astronomy Accessible for the Visually Impaired

Tim Doucette is legally blind. But he can see stars better than you do.

Doucette's Deep Sky Eye Observatory.

posted by mandolin conspiracy (6 comments total)

I love this. Sighted people lean so heavily on the visual senses that we seem to assume that sight is always the best way to interpret data. There's no reason that this has to be true.
posted by tobascodagama at 12:45 PM on August 21, 2017

I'm reminded of the invention of the blink comparator, which was crucial to the discovery of Pluto. Yes, it uses sight to analyze the data, but it did so with a different kind of sight than usual. Rather than trying to pick out the one faint spot that looks different from a thousand other faint stars in the same image (and with there being thousands of images), rely on our ability to pick up motion against a background.

I'm delighted to find out just now that this invention spread to version dating variations on Shakespeare's plays. Slap down two folios of Willy S.'s works and blink back and forth between them to see where they've been amended. I wonder what non-astronomical uses Dr. Merced's technique will bring.
posted by Quindar Beep at 1:23 PM on August 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

Cool! Thanks for posting.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:25 PM on August 21, 2017

Awesome post! Thanks for making this.
posted by loquacious crouton at 5:12 PM on August 21, 2017

That's interesting. From time to time I've pondered why modern computer UIs don't use sound much. I've been thinking about what we can possibly gain from engaging hearing as well as sight, but from making a few annoying prototypes I haven't found anything. Maybe one of these bright people will discover something to make all our daily lives just a bit better.
posted by Harald74 at 12:37 AM on August 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

(BTW, Nullsoft Beep will make your Windows computer sound like a movie computer, with humming tuned to the CPU load and a whole lot of R2-D2 noises on top. Not very useful but fun for a couple of minutes.)
posted by Harald74 at 12:42 AM on August 22, 2017 [1 favorite]