Tactile black hole image

In 2017, the Event Horizon Telescope observed the giant black hole in the center of the galaxy M87. After a great deal of work, in 2019 the collaboration released an image they had produced from the data. It shows the shadow of the black hole against the glow of hot plasma falling in. This Thing is a realization of that image in three-dimensional tactile form. Labels are written in Braille along the sides for the benefit of people with limited or no vision.

This Thing includes three versions: a single-color version that is easy to print but contains only Braille text, a version that uses one change of colors to put text for sighted users on the bottom, and a version that uses a multicolor printer to do the same.

For more details on the project: https://eventhorizontelescope.org/

For the data release used to construct this Thing: https://eventhorizontelescope.org/for-astronomers/data

Print instructions

Category: Physics & Astronomy Print Settings

Printer Brand: Prusa

Printer: i3 MK2S

Rafts: No

Supports: No

Resolution: 0.15 mm or 0.1 mm layer height

Infill: default

Notes:

The simplest version can be printed as is. The color-change version requires the printer to stop and ask the user to change colors before printing the first solid bottom layer. The multicolor version uses a multicolor printer like the MK3 with MMU2.

I recommend gray for the main object as it makes surface detail fairly visible.

I donot recommend changing the size of the object: the Braille text is at the size recommended by the Royal National Institute for Blind people and might not be readable if reduced in size.

How I Designed This

This object was made using a Jupyter notebook running python. This allows the astronomical data to be loaded from its native format, and makes it easy to use solidpython to construct a model from this data.