It sounds like the beginning of a riddle. How can someone who’s blind “see” the upcoming eclipse on Aug. 21? It’s a question solar astrophysicist Henry “Trae” Winter started thinking about several months ago after a blind colleague asked him to describe what an eclipse was like. “I was caught completely flat-footed,” Winter said. “I had no idea how to communicate what goes on during an eclipse to someone who has never seen before in their entire life.” Winter remembered a story a friend told him about how crickets can start to chirp in the middle of the day as the moon covers the sun during an eclipse. So, he told his colleague that story. “The reaction that she had was powerful, and I wanted to replicate that sense of awe and wonder to as many people as I could across the country,” Winter said. So Winter, who works at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, decided to build an app to do just that: help blind people experience this summer’s eclipse.
